The death voyage in the first set of eight barges may never be discussed in Mormon circles, because that would mean the story ended there at Ether 2:7, and everything else was made up, if not the whole sadistic story! The ‘logistics’ are what make Smith’s stories absurd. He didn’t have a clue about geography, distances, environment all of which the ‘Creator of the World’ would have a pretty good idea about. The story of Lehi in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia for 8-10 years is a physical impossibility, with a rationale that would make God a sadist!

The whole concept of building 8 barges at the South end of the Caspian Sea and place all the living creatures that would repopulate the Americas after Noah’s Flood into these airtight, pitch black containers to cross a body of water that was passible around it on foot, makes God not only sadistic, but an absolutely Idiot! This inept idiot God that Smith created killed his chosen people in the ‘trial’ barge/submarine that Smith’s God personally designed! Just like he killed his his chosen people who left Jerusalem around 600 BC to follow a magic ball going in circles in the Arabian Empty Quarter that both man and beast avoided.

The directions that Smith gives in BOM 1st Nephi Ch 16 is following the Red Sea in a ‘South-Southeast direction’. (Vs 13) Smith is saying that in 600 BC they had a compass that hadn’t been invented yet. The chapter has them continue for some time in that direction until vs. 1 in Ch 17 where this compass ball directs them “…and we did travel nearly eastward from that time forth” which would lead them int0 the 250,000 sq. mi of the Empty Quarter!

Mormons forget all about this and do their circular reasoning that because evidence of an ancient civilization was found in America that was talked and written about in Smith’s day, Smith with his creative imagination claims he found a book telling him about this civilization,.And since on going exploration continues to show people existed in North and South America for thousands of years, the book he brings forth telling absurd stories about them is therefore true because it shows not a stupid but miraculous God.

Of course anyone can ‘make up’ miracle scenarios, as is often the case with the Book of Mormon. But, if you start to seriously study the book with logic, it falls apart very quickly. However, if you believe that faith promoting fiction is OK, or if you are taught that logic or the wisdom of man is foolishness with God; or put another way, God can be depicted by false prophets doing things that man thinks stupid, then it just shows how little Man knows about God’s reasons. But if God created the mind of Man to think logically to get wisdom, and this becomes foolishness in His sight, we are all in deep trouble.

One Man’s perspective: Smith/God heard stories about the ‘Mound Builders’ who many Indians in Smith’s time thought were somehow their forefathers and existed in America around the area where Joseph Smith lived a millennia earlier. (2200 BC) Smith had the Jews leave from Jerusalem to America, as Smith’s story would depict, around 600 BC and is the main ‘history’ of the B of M. The 600 BC date that the BOM claims was during the reign of King Zedekiah (who didn’t take the throne until 597 BC. Smith associates this date with the year of the birth of Christ according to Smith’s angel who appeared to Nephi and his father in the desert after leaving Jerusalem. (Unless Smith had his Nephites add an extra month to their lunar calendar every three years in America, the date would be way off for the Nephites.

Smith not only wanted to give an account of the ‘Mound Builders’ to add to his tale of how the Jews who left in 600 BC became savages, he even wanted to give a plausible account of how North and South America got living creatures back after Noah’s flood wiped everything out. (According to Smith and his fantasy, the ‘Garden of Eden’ was in America.)

So, according to Smith and his God, not following Jewish mythology, the ark that set out from America with all the animals, finally landed north of present day Iraq and the people of the Ark, along with the only living animals and fowls began to repopulate the earth in Mesopotamia. We are left to wonder whether alligators, pythons and anacondas died in the flood and the Jaredites brought them to South America as well. Jared’s brother always wondered why God wanted him to bring the poisonous snakes that God used 500 years later to block people and animals for generations from getting to South America. (Ether 9:33) These are things that Man wonders about but are perfectly logical in the mind of God. So foolish Man shouldn’t be questioning God. (Or Smith’s version of a sadistic, idiot God)

There is an illogical beginning about how this record of Ether was first found and then found again later and translated and then paraphrased by Moroni. As the story goes, in finishing his father’s book, Moroni begins to make up lies about his father’s death. He didn’t realize when he escaped from Hill Cumorah that his father spent the last 15 yrs of his life abridging the tons of records that Mormon brought with him from Hill Shim in Columbia, So. America. (Smith made up an interesting Fairy Tale and that he certainly ‘ad libbed’ but once it was written by his scribe, if God was his inspiration, it would be ‘sticky’ to have to go back and change significant mistakes. Or his scribe was part of the Con.

Moroni never tells us about how he got back in the cave with all the records and his father’s corpse and how he found the 24 gold plates of Limhi that hadn’t been spoken of for over 400 yrs. (And would have been destroyed in the great Zarahemla fire at Christ’s crucifixion) Not only was Moroni able to read and translate the confounded language, but made a copy so he could paraphrase the whole record because of no more room on the (Mormon 8:5) plates. Somehow Moroni/Smith thought it was more important to preach to potential readers 1400 years later than to make plausible how this all happened. So we have all kinds of illogical scenarios how this happened, but lets move on now to the ‘death barges’ part.

Smith/God has a leading family in the story with no last name that found favor with God and God is going to guide them to an even more fertile part of the earth than the Fertile Crescent. They are told, as with Noah, to take pairs of all the animals and fowls along with honeybees, fish and flocks and herds and seeds of every kind. Sounds like Noah, you bet, Smith was familiar with that story. With Noah God just had to lead all these animals scattered all over the world to Noah’s Ark. With Smith it was much harder, Jared’s people had to herd them to the Valley of Nimrod and then keep them fed and following two by two for over 1,000 miles to the Arctic North and then leave all the animals, mountain lions, bison, wolves, bears, humans, fowl, bees etc, etc. on the shores of the Barents Sea for 4 years without word from Smith’s God how anyone would survive for even one Winter!

North of Babel were two large Seas, the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea with about a three to five hundred mile strip of land between them. Smith’s God didn’t want them to take the easy land passage, but wanted them to build, not one ship like Noah, but 8 vessels called barges to transport all of the forms of life that would later be found in the Americas! Smith overlooks this logistical nightmare and goes into no detail how this was accomplished.

How would you know how much food and water to bring if you had no idea how long it would take? There is no record of what they were told about regarding the journey’s length. We can only project going north, that the closest first sea would be the Caspian Sea that is about 5-600 miles in length from south to north.

All we have in the record of this first set of 8 barges is Ether 2:6 ‘’… they did travel in the wilderness and did build barges, in which they did cross many waters, being directed continually by the hand of the Lord.” The following verse tells us the Lord did not want them to stop after crossing this body of water and that they should keep going towards the promised land. We will never know why Smith used the term ‘many waters’ indicating to some, many different bodies of water were crossed with this first set of barges.

We do not find out until at least 4 years later that they couldn’t possibly survive in those barges for 600 miles, even though, ‘they were being directed continually by the hand of the Lord’, because God, who had designed the barges made them airtight without any light. (Light would not have helped in creating oxygen.)

Unless we are dealing with idiots and with limited skilled labor and tools, they would have to build each of the eight barges, one at a time. A reasonable God who had never designed such vessels before, would examine the construction. If God, 5 yrs later can put his finger on stones and turn them into eternal lights, nothing could prevent him from entering that first barge to see if anything was overlooked. If not, certainly the brother of Jared would go in and try to see if he could see any daylight when the only door was shut. Only stupid people led by a stupid god would not at least do this basic rule of survival.

Obviously none of these people had ever seen or built a barge like the ones God was directing them to build. According to the Bible Gen. 9:23 Noah lived after the Flood 350 years. Leaving the Ark is dated around 2348 BC, so he would die about 2000 BC. So family left Mt Ararat after landing and eventually got to the area of modern Baghdad. Undoubtedly many generations passed before the building of the Tower that was certainly started while Noah was still alive. We are told Noah was a man of the soil but with the help of God did find tools and did build a ship with no underwater doors and sealed all his planks with pitch inside and out. With Noah, he didn’t need launch or to sail anywhere, he just needed to wait until the water lifted the Ark and then wait until it stopped raining and the water receded.

It would be complicated if they had to travel thousands of miles in specific directions where they were unable to see or control and the vessels that were designed by God and were to be half submarine as well. They had to have a side door big and strong enough for elephants, cureloms as well as bison, deer, elk, horses, black bear, grizzlies, etc, essentially all the animals that would be found later in the Americas. Obviously, the entrance doors wouldn’t have to be as large for the barges with the humans as the ones that had to accommodate elephants.

(If you are skeptical about the Jaredites bringing elephants you need to go to Ch 9: 19 And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms. If Noah’s Flood killed off all living creatures in America, Jarred had to bring everything that is indigenous to America with him in the barges across the mountain waves of the Ocean!)

They would also have to bring various animal foods and water as well as for humans. Who would feed what to the wolves, bears, coyotes for 344 days? Who fed them for 4-5 years at the Arctic Circle? For the bison, cattle, sheep, goats, how much grass will they need depending on the distance and the speed of the vessels? Depending on how long it would take to cross whatever body of water the Lord wanted them to cross, the amount of cargo would depend on the miles to be covered, so the first question to God is how long will it take to cross this first body of water, assuming we have built 8 seaworthy vessels. The size would vary depending on how much cargo would be needed and the length of the voyage would partially depend on the weight of the cargo and whatever was going to propel them forward.

If the barge with the elephants, cureloms, bison, horses, cows, grizzlies, etc was 10 times heavier than the one with the Bro of Jared, with the same force of wind in the same ocean, it would take much, much longer requiring more provisions making the vessel even heavier. When God changed the direction of the wind to accommodate the needs of the first vessel what does he do about the direction of the wind for the vessels after 6 months that are anywhere from a 100 miles to 2,000 miles apart? The Mathematician that designed the first set of barges would be overwhelmed in the complexities of determining how much provisions were needed for vessels with such huge differences in cargo and weight, having no idea of the distance needed to travel.

The drawing at the beginning of the blog, is not accurate for the first set of barges that had no hatch at the top and were designed to role like logs pushed by the wind controlled by the Mormon God. They would obviously be pushed sideways as that would be what would catch the wind. How the wind got them launched or whether they all had to huddle in their airtight containers 40 days until God had it rain enough at the Caspian Sea to raise the 8 vessels, we will never know. And Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates will be very angry if you believe the God he worships would be such an idiot.

Certainly after the first barge was completed, God would have to inspect it along with the brother of Jared to see if God’s specifications had been met. Did God want a side door that opened inward or outward, did he want the hinges on the bottom, right, left side or the top?

If it hinged on the bottom and opened inward or outward, the 4 ton elephants and cureloms would be walking on it. God/Smith was doing it for the first time as well, and it did take a little thought. Whatever was decided on, God and the brother of Jared walked inside and the strongest men proceeded to close the door to see if it had a tight seal. Of course there was immediately total darkness and the brother of Jared thought surely God would say something not knowing that God can work in perfect darkness as he did for a couple of days before he created the Sun. When the brother of Jared started to stumble over the cargo, God took his hand to finish the inspection. Then the brother of Jared started to notice the air was getting a little stale and thought surely God would mention this, not knowing there is no air in space.

But Smith wants intelligent people to believe that they not only didn’t check the first finished barge, they checked none of them and led their animals and children to their deaths because of the stupidity of God and his chosen prophet leader. If all didn’t have an I.Q. of under 40, one would think that one of those barges with the inhabitants waiting a few hours for God to figure out how to launch them would realize it is pitch black and the air is already very stale, and just maybe someone with a 60 I.Q said; if we can find the door in the dark, let us open it for air and ask someone just how long we are expected to be in this airtight container and how will we see to do anything, like pee. The animals were already nervous and peeing on the floor. Why is it that certain people believe if you have enough faith you do not need logic and planning?

So what happened? Did they each go in their designated loaded barge, close the door and wait for a feeling that god was moving the barge into the water? They didn’t wait for 40 days and nights of rain to launch like Noah’s Ark, they would all be dead! Did they calculate the cargo weight and test the door that it sealed tight for each barge and would not be partially under water when they were launched? How would you keep the main door from leaking if you didn’t use pitch? And if you did, how did you get it open when you felt a solid surface? If God’s angels brought them skill saws to make planks, they needed charged batteries and the planks would still need a sealant to make them watertight.

Did they prepare the first barge and get the elephants to help push it into the water and see how it floated? If the elephant barge was the last to launch, who pushed it into the water? It would be maybe 10 times heavier than the others and much slower than the others if it ever got in the water. By then, the occupants of the first barge have been sitting there in total darkness for hours and still didn’t know that the 6-700 mile voyage would be at least 6 weeks being pushed with the wind sideways with no air and in total darkness. God was busy learning how to direct the wind and was unaware that the occupants of the first and second barge were starting to panic gasping for breath.

Now, the only way for the Apologists to get out of this dire predicament is by lying through their teeth again and make a convoluted scenario that the brother of Jared didn’t write of the departure from Babylon until after their arrival at the ‘great sea’. (Ether 2:13) Maybe after his month long vision of the world from beginning to end including, of course, his recent departure from Babylon. He marveled at the Garden of Eden in Missouri and was thoroughly mesmerized by the last stages of Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley, etc. If you think this was all mentally exhausting for the brother of Jared, you are right! The Apologists just do not want to discuss the Book of Ether and it’s absurdities!

However, we still have the stupidity of Jared and friends making all eight barges again at the great waters (Barents Sea) before realizing that there would be no light or air in them and somehow blaming God saying they made them exactly the way the brother of Jared was instructed in the vision he had while camping between the Black and Caspian Seas. Ether 2:16 “And the Lord said: Go to work and build, after the manner of barges which ye have hitherto built. And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did go to work, and also his brethren, and built barges after the manner which they had built, according to the instructions of the Lord.” Smith never explains how these tillers of the soil acquired tools to cut precision pieces of wood from trees, build bulkheads and cut precise holes in the top and bottom of the 8 barges modified at the Barents Sea working on blocks of ice, and where did they acquired the skill to use them as farmers?

Now, for those of little faith, it is hard not to conclude that they had built barges according to instructions from the Lord somewhere in the wilderness before arriving at the ‘great sea’. So this will be one of those many mysteries that will be put on the shelve and not examined carefully like finding no evidence of a Jewish-Nephite Civilization here in North or South America. But is seems clear in Ether 2:19 after all eight barges had been built according to God’s instruction that the brother of Jared was suddenly greatly concerned: “And behold, O Lord, in them there is no light; whither shall we steer? (Another stupid statement since there was no steering mechanism) And also we shall perish, for in them we cannot breathe, save it is the air which is in them; therefore we shall perish.”

If God launched these death traps at the Caspian or another Sea, one would think he became aware of the prayers of those enclosed and immediately created a body state where breathing was not necessary for every living creature in those barges.

He would have to calculate to do this while there was still a little oxygen left so that when he wakens them six weeks later after the crossing that they were not so disorientated that they can’t get the doors open in the dark before the final oxygen runs out. This would have to be the first big miracle and you would think would remain in everyone’s consciousness so they wouldn’t make the same mistake with the second set of barges. But no, God, Smith, Jared’s brother, the workers, no one remembered starting to suffocate in the first set, not even the elephants, and then blanking out until the barges were opened by angels. Not even God remembered!

They are assembled in the valley of Nimrod (this makes it Biblical) God meets them there and all are told to proceed north. Now these are farmers who had flocks and herds who lived near where the people were building a tower to get to heaven. Another decision by God/Smith is to have them all go more than a thousand miles to the freezing north when they can travel three hundred milesin temperate climate to Phoenicia on the Mediterranean where they build sea going ships and an easy way to get to the Promised Land.

We have logistical decisions to make. Which of all of the animals that came out of Noah’s ark would God want to repopulate the Promised Land? So Jared’s brother had a vision of North and South America along with Canada and Alaska to see what kinds of animals and bird life would be there when the man of god, Columbus would discover it 3000 years hence. (This fable by Smith was to help the feeble minded to understand how the America’s got repopulated after Noah’s flood.)

Ether 3:25 “And when the Lord had said these words, he showed unto the brother of Jared all the inhabitants of the earth which had been, and also all that would be; and he withheld them not from his sight, even unto the ends of the earth…and the Lord said unto him; Write these things and seal them up; and I will show them in mine own due time unto the children of men.” This was of course a huge deal for the brother of Jared and he spent months with his cuneiform writing on his clay tablets. He looked as the scenes of the Promised Land as it went by as it was before and after the flood and what it would be when Columbus arrives and what he would have to bring to not make the Mormon God a liar. Vs 25 tells us that the Bro didn’t just see America but all the inhabitant of the world both past and present. That is maybe why 2/3rds if the gold plates were sealed and it would be tough to get the equivalent of two to three thousand English typewritten pages engraved on 24 plates.

The sequence of events would be as follows: Wherever they were led after the angels led them out of the eight dark air tight barges crossing the first body of water, (that would logically be the Caspian Sea, since the Lord guided them northward from Babylon) whatever time it took them to get to ‘that great sea that divides the lands’ is not stated. If they continued north to Murmansk, it might take another 2 months. If God wants to delay their arrival in the Promised Land, he could have them walk to China staying in various fertile areas to plant and harvest food for two to five years. If they went to Murmansk at the Arctic Circle, they can’t stay in tents 4 yrs. If they went to China, their sea voyage would be more than double than from Murmansk, with larger heavier barges for all the extra food and water, and 10-20 times longer than the first voyage on the Caspian Sea.

When they finally arrive at that ‘great sea’ and “dwelt in tents upon the seashore for the space of 4 years.” God finally appears to them with instructions and in Ether 2:16-17 tells them “Go to work and build, after the manner of barges which ye have hitherto built…and the brother of Jared did go to work, and also his brethren, and built barges after the manner which they had built, according to the instructions of the Lord.” Can anyone explain how the most intelligent being in the universe could tell them to build again the same defective barges that would now have to hold more than five to ten times the cargo and water?

At the end of Vs 18, it states: “…I have made the barges according as thou hast directed me.” Where they got the trees and how all the people and animals ate and drank for 4 years on the Arctic seashore, we are not told. We do not know if there were fields of flowers so the honeybees could survive and if the fish they were bringing were fresh water fish or ocean fish. We don’t know how far the flocks and herds strayed to find food or what horses, cows, oxen, elephants, asses, bison, cureloms or cumoms did, but they were happy to drink out of the tank with the fish. One would think they utilized the elephants and cureloms to bring trees to the seashore for construction. (Ether 9:19 “And they also had horses and asses, and there were elephants, cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms.” These were just part of the variety that the brother of Jared saw in his vision that must be replenished in the Americas)

So the brother of Jared knew that at least some of the barges needed to be larger than the rest with a larger door to accommodate the elephants, cureloms and cumoms. It was actually decided at the Caspian Sea that because of the huge size of the pairs of elephants, cureloms and cumoms the elk and moose and their eating and drinking capacity, that only one to a barge would be appropriate, so six of the eight barges would have to be heavy duty with large openings of at least 9ft high and 6ft wide. That would mean a flat side of at least 12ft with a draft of at least 4ft. If there was no draft, the sides would have to be tall enough so part of the door does not drag in the water when loaded with 150 or more tons. The width of the barge would have to be at least 12ft.

So here we are 6 yrs or so after their arrival at the great sea with 8 barges lying on the beach with scaffolding and no mention of how vast this ‘great sea’ was and how long it might take for the two lighter barges with women and children and a few sheep and swine and how long it might take for the heavy ones with at least a 150 tons of cargo with 20 tons of animals. No one could remember the first voyage because then the barges were airtight and pitch black and they all died the second day.

So it was obvious to the brother of Jared that at least two strong men for the six large barges with the humongous animals is a must. The four families of the friends of Jared and his brother would supply 4 adult men (husbands). Jared volunteered with his oldest son, which would make six. The brother of Jared had a 16 year old son with a 17 year old sister that thought they could help in a barge with the elephant she had been feeding for 5 years just as long as the grizzly wasn’t in that barge.

The brother of Jared would have to stay in the first barge where all the cuneiform tablets of the history of the world were, along with the seer stones, and where he could count the days better. He and his God just didn’t realize that barges with 10 times the weight of his would take more than twice as long to get there. Why didn’t his God tell him these things? Why does he now have to tell his God that there was no air or light in the barges of the first sea crossing and they all died?

The Caspian Sea was 600 miles from end to end. But now, they have all been resurrected and have lost memory of how long it took. How long is the ‘great sea’? Well, it depends on where you launch from and your arrival point. If it is Murmansk, Russia to Montreal, Quebec, it may be only about 3,000 to 4,000 miles. It will depend if you are blown all the way with fierce winds or if God had learned about ocean currents and utilized them. (Ether 6:6 “…and terrible tempests which were caused by the fierceness of the wind…8…winds did never cease to blow”) If you come from China to California it will be more than double.

In all fairness to the travelers, God must inform them of what to expect. There are tons of crops that must be harvested for food and sterile plastic containers for tens of thousands of gallons of water. If you believe they lived in tents for the 4 years at the great sea, it can’t be the northern part of Russia where the temperature is below zero for 4-5 months of the year!

Storage space on a barge for 600 miles is quite different than six to nine thousand miles. It is not just the miles; it is the weight that slows them for extra weeks and months. Someone needed to figure this out as lives depend on it! How can we pack 20 times more food and water in the same size barge we used on the Caspian Sea? Have you ever tried to blow fresh air into a bottle of air and found out the old air remains unless you make another opening.

Slaves being brought from Africa died in holds of ships with large openings on the deck because there was no circulation in the bottoms of the holds and enough oxygen did not reach them. People die in sealed containers trying to get into another country and underestimated the supply of oxygen. Not only was there not enough oxygen on these barges, the supply of nourishing food for man or beast along with water was inadequate and we are not even talking about the mountain waves and the constant seasickness that prevailed!

There are now two baby elephants and four baby cureloms and commons, do we take them with us? We have herds of cattle and flocks, this means 12 -15 times more cargo of food and water for everyone! We obviously need to leave more than half the animals here. God needs to tell us if the bison, grizzly, brown bear, moose, grey wolf, coyote, polar bear along with the South American howler monkey needs to be found in the Americas or not. Can God’s Predestination Plan that he showed Jared’s brother in a vision be altered a little to make life more bearable? But if god has been doing this for innumerable worlds, it is not likely he wants to dispense with any of his creation.

If God knew all of this, why didn’t he tell us when we arrived at the great sea 4 years ago, asked the sister of Jared? We could have planted large acreages of land for provisions for a sea journey that was 12-24 times longer than the Caspian Sea voyage, depending on which barge you are in?

But is the Mormon God still learning on the job along with his ‘chosen’? When God told the brother of Jared to build the 8 barges at the ‘great sea’ exactly like the prior set, somehow, the brother of Jared totally forgot the main design disaster. He didn’t remember after the first of the second set, nor the second, third, forth, etc. until he had finished all eight as he had ‘hitherto built’. Designed for a voyage 10-12 times shorter. But he remembers it in Ether 2:19-20 and with his skill saw with lifetime batteries he neatly saws two hatches (holes) in each barge, one on the top and one on the bottom with florescent rocks for lights.

There is a price to pay for being a college dropout. The brother of Jared had learned to write on cuneiform clay tablets in Babylon, and was running out of clay here at the seashore, why did God want him to write the whole history of the world on them when there was no extra clay? We will never know why Smith used the word ‘hole’ and ‘stopping’ or ‘unstopping’ the hole in Ether 2:20, as though they had a circular saw with 16 large corks to use as stoppers that wouldn’t pop in or out when they were submerged in the depths of the ocean.

Chapter 3 makes a big deal about getting God to touch the rocks that the brother of Jared wanted God to glow continually for at least a couple of years and maybe until 1830 when Smith discovered the cave that was lighted at Cumorah where all the gold plates were stacked along with the sword of Laban. Brigham Young said there were several wagon loads of plates stacked there. Brigham said it was bright like the noon day sun in the Aladdin Cave where Mormon wrote. They are now all gone. We find that God and the Devil can move gold easily through the ground. (Mormon 1:18)

Instead of discussing the problems at hand, like which animals not to take, how to cram 10 times more provisions and water into the same size barges, etc. etc., a religious discussion is had about the attributes of God/Christ and who created what, and all the writings that the brother of Jared would be responsible for. We are told in chapters 4 and 5 Moroni’s description of all the writings the brother of Jared had to do while his brethren were planting and harvesting a still unknown quantity of provisions for a trip that they had no idea how long, whether 2 weeks or two years in length.

In Chapter 6, Moroni/Smith stop preaching to Smith’s potential converts and focuses back on what happens next. (Probably, two years more have elapsed while all of the religious writing is done and crops are planted and harvested.)

Without any indication to anyone as to the voyage length and how much provisions and water would be needed, we have Ether 6:4 “…when they had prepared all manner of food, that thereby they might subsist upon the water, and also food for their flocks and herds, and whatsoever beast or animal or fowl that they should carry with them…that when they had done all these things they got aboard of their barges, and set forth in the sea, commending themselves unto the Lord their God.” Commending themselves to a God who’s record was a disaster, or mixed at best up to this point. Dumb people!

Well, this is a lot easier said than done! If the barges are sitting on the beach at a place where the tide does not hinder the construction, we have at least 6 barges filled with tons and tons of large animals and provisions. Someone needs to decide where the provisions and water goes and where the elephant, horse, bull, ox, cow, bear along with maybe a wolf, jaguar and a few sheep and goats go. A little barrier is needed to be placed around the hatch on the bottom. God had told them at the end of chapter 2 after this last set of barges had been completed that this coming voyage would be different because on the ocean He would create mountain waves and furious winds.

Why no one had the guts to ask just how long this torture would last and whether we packed enough provisions and water on the barges that weigh 10 times more than the first two barges with the women and children, we will never know! Is it too much to ask God with the ‘mountain waves’ and the barge is at a 45 or 60 degree angle, what happens to tons of cargo and tons of animals? Do people get crushed? What did you have in mind, God, with the holes in the top & bottom when an elephant crashes into it?

So how does this barge with two hundred tons of cargo ‘set forth into the sea’, or, any of the barges, for that matter? Do they build ramps six feet high for the cattle, elephant, bison, etc to walk through the door and down to the floor level of the barge without knowing what force will set them into the water and without damaging the barges with the massive weight? Did God make another mistake by not having docks where the barges are loaded with both, provisions, animals and people? Certainly having wolves, coyotes, bears, bison, bulls, oxen, elk, horses along with the elephants and flocks, it would be tricky to coax them all to walk gingerly down the dock to their bobbing new home for 2 yrs.

Lets stop to think what series of events would be in a true story with reasonably intelligent people, when God heard the prayer of the brother of Jared and instructed them along with their friends to meet him northward in the valley of Nimrod. In Ether 1:38 Jared’s brother was told they would be led by God to a choice promised land…in vs. 41 they are told as was Noah to take animals both male and female of every kind, he is also to take seeds of every kind…so all these farmers knew was that they would be farming and raising flocks and herds and basically doing what Noah did except there is no word to them before their departure, that a Noah’s Ark adventure would be involved where tools and expertise would be needed to build it. There may have been some folklore about Noah and the ark but the brother of Jared was not told to bring any scripture that didn’t yet exist.

Ether 2:2-3 gives the feeling that the valley of Nimrod was where they collected everything that God intended for them to take, including a tank of fish, honeybees and fowls that were caught and presumably kept in improvised cages. They are told in vs. 5 that they would be guided into a quarter where Man had never been. Just where that was, we will never know.

Nothing is said about the cattle, cows, bulls, oxen, elephants, bison, bear, wolves, coyote, cureloms, etc that they had to bring with them. We have to keep searching to become fully aware of the variety of animals that needed to go into those 8 barges both times! Ether 6:4 tells us “…that they might subsist upon the water, and also food for their flocks and herds, and whatsoeverbeast or animal or fowl that they should carry with them…”

We have to go to Ether 9:18-19 to learn about a few more of the animals they brought like “And also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and of sheep, and of swine, and of goats and also many other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man. [Like maybe Buffalo, deer, elk, bear, etc all found in America] And they also had horses and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms.”

So, in Smith’s storytelling, since he teaches the only living creatures that survived Noah’s flood were the ones that were breeding around Babel and of course the Jaredites would have to bring them in order to speak of them as part of their civilization. And later Nephi told of them being there when the Nephites arrived. 1Nephi 18:25. Good Mormons can only believe the Jaredites brought them as well as all the species native to the Americas.

So, the logistics are beyond belief. Here the farmers with their farmer tools arrive at this first body of water that could have been avoided by walking around it. And are told to build 8 barges using farmer tools. They may have had an ‘axe like’ tool to chop down trees for firewood, but no homes were built of wood. They would have to chop rough planks from whatever tree might have grown there. They would need no such a tool like a ‘saw’ to build huts of adobe brick. There could have been some barge builders on the Tigris that would float goods down the river that had a type of chisel and God could send someone back to see if that person might come along and bring his tools…providing his language hadn’t been confounded….Smith was smart enough to know the less said here, the better!

It is likely the ‘Lord’ spoken of here was not the God that instructed Noah in his shipbuilding efforts. That Lord at least knew with rough timber, you needed a lot of pitch between planks to keep the water out. Genesis 6:14 “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shall pitch it within and without with pitch.” The Bible God at least knew that gopher wood was more suitable for ocean travel vessels than just any old tree that might be growing at the seashore.

The logistics are very tricky especially for gods and people who have never done this skilled complicated type of activity. In the history of shipbuilding no new ship has been launched fully loaded with people and cargo. They would launch the vessel to see if it was seaworthy and then have a dock waiting to load cargo and passengers. If they had more than one vessel to launch, they would not build an extra dock for each new vessel. They would wait for the first to be loaded and then the second vessel would be moved to the dock. In the case of the first set of barges, the wait in the water for the first barge to the last barge being loaded could easily be a day or more. This would be time enough for all the occupants to die. It is not important as they would all be dead in two days unless God created his first miracle because he heard the cries of help after a few hours. Strange, everyone including God has amnesia on this event.

In the next verse, after setting themselves in the sea “…and the Lord God caused that there should be a furious wind blow…towards the promised land; and thus they were tossed upon the waves of the sea before the wind.” If you are a 5 ton elephant and you are tossed toward the entrance door at a 45degree angle, bad things start to happen.

The barge immediately gets turned on one of its sides, which is wider than the bottom and has over twice the flat surface of any other part of the barge. It has to be at least 10 to 12 ft high with enough flat surface underneath the door so the door, that hasn’t been tested, does not drag in the water with the tons of cargo. A barge has little or no ‘draft’ and would be a very rough ride on a stormy sea. So the wind has to catch this flat surface of the side and push the barge sideways the entire voyage.

The door would have to be massively strong to remain airtight after being hit by 5 tons at 5 or 10 miles per hour. Hopefully God or one of his angels was watching and tried to figure out how to right the barge again. It did have one big advantage over the other barges and was that the two hatches that were just a foot or so above water could now be both opened and circulating air could be had by the occupants if God would slow the wind a little.

Otherwise, he would have to reverse the tempest and hope a wave would raise the barge to its normal position, however this would now be much tougher because the weight of the elephant and all the cargo was now on the side with the door in the water. Too bad the Mormon God didn’t study engineering in the world he lived in before becoming God.

Here is another thought, the Mormons believe and teach “as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become”. This is a powerful image for a lot of the uneducated converts to Mormonism. With this church, you could be a lowly farmer or janitor with no education and still attain Godhood, if you paid your tithing and obeyed the leaders of the LDS church.

Here we are obviously dealing with an exalted farmer or possibly a singer like King David who would know nothing about shipbuilding or engineering. It is also interesting this ‘godhood’ concept for lowly man that it doesn’t require him to come again to an earth to be crucified to save it. This is almost never discussed…for Mormons who become Gods it is just glory and gold covered streets with mansions of beautiful women who never age and bear children every year forever!

But, here we have a different Christ than what we find in the Bible. This Christ is the Lord God who the Jaredites are dealing with; a resurrected exalted man who must come to earth again with yet another ‘mortal’ body. The original B of M is the strongest supporter of the Triune theory of God. It speaks of Mary being ‘the mother of God’ until it was changed to the ‘Mother of the Son of God’. The prophet Abinadi in the book of Mosiah 15:1-4 “And now Abinadi said unto them: I would that ye should understand that God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people. 2. And because he dwelleth in flesh he shall be called the Son of God, and having subjected the flesh to the will of the Father, being the Father and the Son—3. The Father, because he was conceived by the power of God; and the Son, because of the flesh; thus becoming the Father and Son…And they are one God, yea the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth.”

If we follow what the Book of Mormon says here, then all of those aspiring to be Mormon Gods would have to be willing to subject themselves to the ‘flesh’ again and be the ‘sacrifice’ for all the children he created with his many wives for another world somewhere in the universe.

So the Mormon God is always learning and it seems that the Mormon God who designed these barges has a lot to learn about shipbuilding and how it affects little barges on the ocean with their occupants when fierce winds make mountain waves. And why fresh air cannot get down to the occupants unless there is some way to circulate the air while the barge is gyrating violently. When the barges all flip on their largest flat surface, which they all will ultimately do and both hatches are exposed where both can be open, then if the Mormon God finds that he can manipulate the ocean currents as easily as the wind, he could leave them on their side with fresh circulating air with a much more comfortable trip with no mountain waves. No matter which side the barge is flipped on, they will still have to get their skill saws out and cut openings for all the animals to get to dry land. Which means there has to be at least 8 skill saws if there are 8 barges landing in different places.

Otherwise, with just one hole, even if open all the time, many if not all the occupants will die. But because of the 10 fold doubling of the weight with the 6 barges, even with a nice safe current, the speed of the 6 heavy laden barges will be much slower and their arrival much, much later to the destination with the necessity of more food and water. So if God thinks he’s done after Jared’s barge arrives and goes on to do other things, who knows where the other 6 barges will land a year later without God directing the current?

With no wind and no current they could be bobbing up and down in the ocean for years to come! Or until Jared cries to the Lord, what happened to the other 6 barges! We have eaten all the little piggys that were in our barge and we badly need the barge with the chicken, goats, cows and seeds for planting along with our farmer tools, since I don’t remember which barge, please bring them all as quickly as you can without the fierce winds and mountain waves. Feed them with manna and quail if you have to. You can get practice for the Moses exodus coming up that you showed me when you showed me the whole civilization from beginning to end. Wow! What Predestination! Will everyone keep to the script?

So when we read in Ether 6:4 “…flocks and herds, and whatsoever beast or animal or fowl that they should carry with them…they got aboard their barges and set forth into the sea” . So Smith was leaving a lot of room for all kinds of creatures to be brought here to America that would have died in Noah’s flood including all the ‘poisonous serpents’ spoken of in Ether 9:31-33 that would indicate the ‘narrow neck of land’ as being Panama which is 45 jungle miles as the crow flies in width and a possible ‘days journey’ for a Nephite .(if someone spent a few weeks hacking out a path) There would be steep rugged mountains to be crossed, rather than the Isthmus of Tehuantepec theory where the distance in more like 125 miles in width and certainly more than a days journey. It is swampy and mostly jungle with paths to be hacked and gorges and mountains to be climbed. (Helaman 4:7)

In deciding which animals that came out of the ark to take with them, choices were made. They did not take the useful camel or dromedary but chose rather the Llama and Alpaca along with the guanaco and took the last of their kind in the Middle East as they did with the bison and buffalo and coyote and the Polar Bear, penguin and seals that are to this day indigenous only to the North and South American Continents. Ha! The Howler Monkeys and the colorful bird life of the jungles of Brazil were a special challenge to the brother of Jared until he arrived in the Valley of Nimrod, where to his great astonishment, the Lord had prepared another Garden of Eden where all of these birds and animals had been replenishing since coming out of the ark. This story of the vision of the brother of Jared was neither written nor seen in any ordinary fashion of his day. It will take a latter-day prophet with the daring of Joseph who has no fear of Man, God or Devil with a creative imagination to exceed all things since the prophet Moses.

He will bring forth to frail Man with his lack of faith the evidence of a master plan behind all of this. There are those feeble uninspired ones who think that God has created ‘worlds without number’ and didn’t learn anything other than what primitive man knew. Let me tell you God had an iphone long before Steve Jobs, he just called it a Seer Stone, and for lack of a better word Joseph referred to the thing that everyone looks into for inspiration as a white stone that would tell them everything. (The white stone being the the iphone screen.)

Does anyone in their right mind think the vision that God showed of the beginning of the world to the end was somehow made up on the clouds? Does any good Mormon believe for a minute that his God who has created and peopled worlds without number was still writing on ‘stone’ when he gave the Ten Commandments? He had his iPad that was handed to Moses and kept in the sacred Ark of the Covenant. Has everyone forgot that God’s course is ‘one eternal round’? Do you think God is working a new experiment with every world that he creates and peoples with his own children? Does anyone ‘search the scriptures’ anymore, other than at FARMS?

No! Man’s logic is not always ‘foolishness’. Clay was not always available so God had an angel bring the brother of Jared an identical seer stone with a video taken of the previous world that God created and that followed the same identical script. They were all equipped with 1,000 yr. batteries.

Yes, Moroni said that the brother of Jared ‘wrote’ a lot of things, but what was meant was that he ‘recorded’ a lot of things and saved it on his seer stone. (iphone) Moroni was not a Seer, he was fixated on becoming an Angel and did not find Mosiah the Seer’s translation or the Interpreters or iphone to help him with his translation. Ether 3:28 “…he (brother of Jared) should seal up the two stones which he had received and show them not…” The last we heard of these iphone stones before Smith, was with King Mosiah in Mosiah 28 where he as a Seer was given not only the stones that Smith claimed to have in 1828 but Mosiah made a complete translation of the 24 plates with the help of the iphone stones with the thousand year battery that God has since replaced twice.

It is interesting how the early stories of Smith translating told by his first scribe and his wife of placing the ‘seer stone’ (iphone) in Smith’s hat and dictating what he saw appear on the screen. To the 19th and 20th Century Man, this seemed impossible that a whole library of information could be contained on something as small as one’s thumb. But now we know, with God and Steve Jobs, nothing is impossible!

Oh ye of little faith! Why would Emma, Martin, and all those good people lie about the translation that the iphone performed in Smith’s hat from the ancient text? But our subject is the 8 barges and as many critics point out, why 8 when Noah only had one vessel? In reviewing the film over and over again on his iphone stone, the brother of Jared saw where each species ended up when Columbus discovered the Americas. He knew the Polar Bears along with the seals and penguins and a couple of wolves, elk and caribou needed to be up north so he put them along with the grizzlies and salmon fish along with the cumoms in barge 6 that would be headed to Alaska, which was the name he saw on his iphone map. He thought Ikkimo and Ikkimi would be the ideal pair to care for them in the barge and would end up being the first Eskimos.

So there was a very valid reason why God needed 8 barges to go to several different continents with the species that would later be found and that Man had to accept by faith. Just dropping the Kangaroo off in Australia was a feat that will be described only in the full text of the iphone vision that will be released to all those with the Celestial Ap to download it, if they are proven worthy.

So keep the faith, brethren…there are answers out there for those who seek…

Mormon depiction of Jaredite barges following each other. The wind would catch the sides and push them sideways to maximize discomfort for all occupants.

Questions Jaredite barges…Book of Mormon, book of Ether

How many people started the journey northward to the Valley of Nimrod.

Jared and his brother=2 it says nothing about their parents.

Ether 1:41 indicates that both Jared and his brother had families that should go with them. The verse indicates that they were farmers and herdsmen, not shipbuilders. The verse indicates that other friends with families would go with them. Ether 6:16 tells us after landing in America years later that the friends numbered 22 souls. This could represent 4 families of 8 adults with 14 children.

Verse 14 tells us that Jared has four sons but we are not told if any had wives, and Jared’s brother had sons and daughters. There is no mention whatever of Jared’s parents so we presume they died or declined to go. To make it easy let us say Jared’s brother had two girls and two boys.

Verse 11 says they were 344 days on the water. How is it possible to be in an enclosed container gyrating to the point of turning upside down in the open ocean with mountain waves and fierce winds that never ceased, with lights on 24/7 and only on rare occasions is the hatch opened for air and to see if it was day or night, and still be able to keep track of each 24 hour period 344 times??? The question, of course is, are we dealing with a sadistic God that likes to torture people as long as possible or are we dealing with some ridiculous tale by J. Smith for whatever reason.

It is easy to forget that, if you believe such a journey, you have to believe the Noah story where God didn’t have him build 8 different ships. The Bible God knew that one larger ship on the open ocean with giant waves is better than 8 bathtub submarine versions, at least for the occupants of the vessels.

The lunatic idea of carving holes in 8 finished vessels both on the top and bottom is laughable in a fairytale, and tragic in real life when a man with an I.Q. of 90 would know better. Where would they get the tools and expertise to cut into planks and make a hatch that is opened and closed quickly and be waterproof when closed especially submerged in the depths of the ocean, and can withstand an elephant crashing into it when the barge overturns or when an 8 foot wave hits the side of the boat throwing all the contents to the far side at a 45 degree angle or more.

In Ether 2:16 God tells Jared’s brother to make another set of barges “after the manner of the barges which ye have hitherto built“, and of course got into and traversed a large body of water. Now he is giving instruction to build another 8 in the same fashion to cross another body of water. The next 2 verses described what Moriancumer has now built finishing with “I have made the barges according as thou hast directed me.” All eight!

In Vs 19 an absurd statement is made about needing lights in a closed container in order to see to ‘steer‘. The ridiculousness continues when he explains to God they won’t be able to breathe because he built them exactly like the ones God told him to build again, where they crossed a large body of water, but now, much to both God and Jared’s brother’s surprise they realize neither they nor the animals can breathe in the barges they built before or the ones waiting for launching on the beach! The blind leading the blind.

Jared’s brother wondered while making again the 8 barges, and reviewing his Noah story, why God wouldn’t want them all in one large boat like He designed for Noah. They certainly used enough wood on the eight to make one large comfortable ship for ocean travel. Noah was only told to take two of every kind of animals because the Bible God designed a stable vessel. In Ether 6:4 we find that the Jaredites took ‘flocks‘ and ‘herds‘ and whatever other beast they should carry with them along with provisions.

If we can believe Ether 9:18-19 besides the birds, bees, fish, cattle, oxen, cows, sheep, swine, goats, we find in vs 19 that if the flood killed all living creatures in North and South America, they had to have brought in those 8 barges elephants, horses, asses & especially cumons and cureloms which were very useful to man but seem to have died out.

If we want to stretch the logic further, they would have had to bring all animal and bird life indigenous to North and South America, including the grizzly, coyote, bison, mountain lion, wolf, jaguar, monkeys, anaconda, etc.

13. If we have to deal with elephant size cumons and cureloms along with horses, oxen, grizzlies, bison, asses, bulls, cattle the extra hatch on the bottom would be very problematical with fierce winds that never did cease with mountain waves putting these huge animals weighing tons shifting violently from one side to the other and eventually landing on what was once the top hatch along with tons of food for the occupants. Hell would be a welcome relief for anyone subject to 24 hours per day for 344 days with no circulating fresh air to breathe. Much longer if you are in the large animal barges!. Do a simple test, take an empty bottle, except for the air that is in it and then take a deep breath and try and add your air to the bottle with as much pressure as you like. It is like with the airtight barges no new air can come in unless there is a way to vent the container. The ‘fierce winds’ skimming over the top of the hatch will get no fresh air where it is needed. The mountain waves precludes the times when the hatch was open.

Ether 6:5 “…the Lord God caused that there should be a furious wind blow upon the face of the waters, towards the promised land; and thus they were tossed upon the waves of the sea before the wind…they were many times buried in the depths of the sea, because of the mountain waves which broke upon them and also the great and terrible tempests which were caused by the fierceness of the wind.”

14. For starters, if God wanted elephants in America after the flood, he picked the worst way to transport them there. An elephant weighs between 4 and 6 tons. It eats 5% of its body weight per day so in 20 days it would eat 4 to 6 tons of vegetation plus 30-50 gallons of water per day. So we have 17 periods of 20, or 17 times 6 tons or about 100 tons of food for one elephant and at least 13,000 gallons of water just for the one elephant. Can you imagine a 4 ton elephant or a 2000 lb horse or oxen being tossed against the hatch in the top or bottom or against the human feeding it? Smith knew about flat bottom barges on the Erie Canal that transported goods animals and products on a very stable water way, not an ocean. If mountain waves’ broke upon them, this caused violent unexpected movements inside that moved people, animals and tons of cargo violently against the sides or what was once the top when it turned over. There would be deaths and serious injuries the very first day! And deaths by lack of oxygen the 2nd and 3rd day.

Obviously these heavily laden huge animal barges would be dragging through the water at a fraction of the speed of the ‘people’ barges. It would be obvious that for an elephant to enter a barge, the entrance would have to be much larger and with the weight of the animals and provisions 50-100 times greater than Jared’s barge, the construction needed to be considerably stronger. There is no indication how these barges with over 200 tons of cargo ever got loaded and launched in the water! And if God was trying to dodge hitting islands or reefs he would have his hands full changing the wind direction if the barges were strung out hundreds of miles apart. Mormon God! Even I know you made a bad choice compared to the Bible God’s Noah.

15. A horse consumes 2-3% of its body weight per day with 6-8 gallons of water. A cow eats about 80 pounds of feed per day with a regular supply of water. In a gyrating vessel with low oxygen you certainly wouldn’t want anyone to be pregnant! Clearly God and Smith never thought through the ramifications of this fable.

16. No question, the barge with Elephants, horses, oxen, bison, grizzlies, etc with food would need to prepare for a much longer voyage than Jared’s barge. Elephants leave huge amounts of dung and the caretakers of these precious animals would have their hands full trying to keep urine and fecal matter from contaminating whatever they are being fed. With the mountain waves and seawater flowing in whenever the hatch is opened to dump the waste, there were those who murmured about God’s choice of travel. There may have been those singing praises to God in Jared’s barge, but not the animal barges!

17. Whenever the hatch was opened for air, more seawater came in than air! They were lucky to get a couple of buckets of vomit, urine and feces thrown out before the next wave shoved more liquid into their living quarters. Moisture caused their food to mold and rot. Without circulation the air was not life sustaining. Many slaves died being brought to America in holds of ships from lack of oxygen because of lack of circulation with top vents open.

18. If, as some apologists speculate, the group walked all the way to China to embark on the ocean voyage, then they would have to interrupt their march many times to find or grow food for an uncertain voyage. If they brought seeds, they would have to find a fertile place where they would grow, harvest it and collect seeds for another year. China was thousands of miles away and they had no idea how far. Why God had them build 8 air tight barges to cross an unnecessary body of water is beyond reason, especially since they were death traps that would kill everyone within a day or two with no air. A march to China could easily take 2-4 years. Didn’t God know the timeframe any more than J. Smith?

19. So why did God think that 344 days in 8 small submerged vessels on the open ocean with fierce winds and mountain waves was more appropriate than one ship like Noah where the animals were contained but the humans had the freedom of fresh air on the deck whenever they felt the need and the refuse could easily be thrown overboard?

20. Had God directed them to Murmansk, Russia, built one boat like Noah and sailed for Quebec the total travel would have been a fraction of going to China and the sea travel one fifth the miles. Why does the Mormon God purposely punish his chosen? With Lehi’s group they could have arrived in Bountiful in 3 months with no suffering. But God/Smith has them going in circles in the dreaded Empty Quarter of Arabia for 8 years which would not have been humanly possible! He then tripled the sea voyage distance with the hardships of food, water and the difficulty of sailing 15,000 miles in a ‘great calm’.

“`I would say – and I am not exaggerating – that 75 percent of the country’s major investment schemes are hatched in the Salt Lake City-Provo area,'” (Ogden Standard-Examiner, 26 March 1984, p. 10A).

The question is whether Joseph Smith was relying on the ignorance of his followers to believe whatever he told them and did other potential scammers see the opportunity for self gain in affiliating themselves and learn from the master Con Man as with MLM marketing today in Utah. Was ‘Polygamy’ the second scam after the ‘gold plates’ and ‘seer stone’?

Book of Mormon 19th Century Scam…250,000 sq mi of nothing but sand!

What Man or Beast could live in this environment continually for eight years?

Much has been written about the early ‘con’ life of Joseph Smith. We know he was convicted in court for being a ‘glass looker’ who defrauded farmers into thinking he could find buried treasure by looking at his seer stone placed in his hat. The Smiths were into superstition and into religious magic. They firmly believed that people could see things in seer stones and of course believed in sorcery such as when Pharaoh’s Sorcerers turned wooden rod/staves into live snakes. Moses could do the same trick but made a bigger snake that ate up the smaller ones.

Exodus 7:10 And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the LORD had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent…now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments.

12 For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.

Smith’s father was known as a ‘Rodsman’ when he still lived in the state of Vermont, and was called when Farmers needed to find minerals or water with a witch hazel stick or sometimes called a ‘Dowsing’ or ‘Divining Rod’.

Oliver Cowdery, Smith’s scribe and Second Elder in the Church was also a ‘rodsman’ who received revelations from the same ‘God’ that Smith did.

For those who take the time to research the Book of Commandments, it contains purported revelations from God to Smith, and the revelation concerning Oliver Cowdery’s Divining Rod capabilities has been altered in the Doctrine and Covenants from Chapter 7 to Section 8 and the original references to Cowdery’s ability to communicate with God by the power of the ‘Rod’ are completely changed.

In the Book of Commandments we have ‘Chapters’. So in Chapter VII we find in verse 3 the following words to Cowdery from Smith’s God.

“O remember, these words and keep my commandments. Remember this is your gift. [This 1st gift was ‘the spirit of Revelation’ the same gift that Moses had] Now, this is not all, for you have another gift, which is the gift of working with the rod: behold it has told you things: behold there is no other power save God that can cause this rod of nature, to work in your hands for it is the work of God and therefore whatsoever you shall ask me to tell you by that means, that will I grant unto you that you shall know.”

There are hundreds and hundreds of word changes from various chapters of the Book of Commandments when they re-published it as Doctrine and Covenants, just as there is significant change in doctrine between the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon and later editions when they changed such things from Mary being the Mother of God to the Mother of the Son of God. 1Nephi 11:18. ‘of the Son’ was added twice in later editions.

18 And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh.

The Book of Mormon was the greatest supporter of the Triune God theory when the prophet Abinadi stated Mosiah 15:1

“ And now Abinadi said unto them: I would that ye should understand that God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people.

2 And because he dwelleth in flesh he shall be called the Son of God, and having subjected the flesh to the will of the Father, being the Father and the Son—

3 The Father, because he was conceived by the power of God; and the Son, because of the flesh; thus becoming the Father and Son—

How could someone who dictated the above passage claim he saw two separate Gods 10 yrs earlier. Smith had no problem changing his or God’s mind. The Triune God theory along with a ban on polygamy ended with the printing of the Book of Mormon. The 1st vision account of the godhead was written after 1830.

The followers of this great con artist have followed the same path even if not as audaciously. Like a cult, they do not covenant to God or Christ, but to the Cult itself. If Lucifer is the great deceiver, then what better doctrine than ‘the end justifies the means’. Mormons encourage ‘faith promoting fiction’ if it produces faith in the Cult.

Matthew 24 Christ tells of some of what happens in the last days, Vs 23:

Matt. 24:33 “For in those days, there shall also arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if possible, they shall deceive the very elect, who are the elect according to the covenant.”

In order to deceive someone who is on his way to being ‘the elect’ you would have to have at least outwardly, a pretty good set of beliefs that were followed for the wrong reason. Like in the Mormon Cult Temple you make covenants not to God or Christ but with oaths to the Cult, with death penalties that have been dropped in the last 30 yrs.

It is ultimately man’s greed that allows con men to have the success that they achieve, along with trying to gain an advantage over their peers in this life or the next. Basically, no matter what I am in this life, if I remain faithful to the Mormon Church, I can be a God in the next life, create my own world where I am worshiped. I can have as many wives as I like and create an earth and people it with the offspring of those wives! If everyone doesn’t do exactly as I say, I can send them all to Hell. This is an idea that has wide appeal (mostly to men) and they do their best to get the girls to go along with most of them getting conned that they will be the only wife in heaven. I knew a young mormon girl in Los Angeles who became the ‘spiritual wife’ of the Bishop when she was 14 years of age. This was a tightly held secret that she finally told me about when she was 45 years old . She never told her current Mormon husband of this prior commitment.

Smith relied heavily on his copy of the King James Bible, but didn’t spend enough time to learn all he needed to know to write 1Nephi or any of the rest of his book. He initially had it right when he called himself the ‘author’. Later when he designated himself as ‘translator’ the theories have never ceased as to how he did it. It seems incredible that anyone can make a translation of an unknown record in a dead language without having to look at it, without ‘magic’ or deception being involved.

D. Michael Quinn’s ‘Early Mormonism and The Magic World View’ is a must.

Smith was supposed to restore the Gospel of Miracles again. Not just raising the dead and healing the sick that got immediate attention and results, but Smith wanted to show how his God can keep humans and animals in airtight containers for a month without any ill effects.

260,000 sq mi of the Empty Quarter where the Brass Ball guided them, if they turned East before or at the 19th parallel. The 20th Parallel is a range of high mountains going to Muscat-Bountiful and has been continually inhabited from 1,000 BC. It’s the last stop for Frankincense traders going to India.

Smith wanted to show that his God could keep his chosen few going in circles in nothing but sand dunes for 8 years because the brass ball (1Nephi 16:10) that could write and give directions was so sensitive that if anyone in the group doubted its ability to get them to their destination directly and efficiently or doubt it couldn’t find wild game for Nephi to shoot with the same stick for 8 years, he would punish all with death or bad health for the rest of their lives by guiding them in circles so they would be eating nothing but raw scavenger meat for those 8 years! God, of course, had to change the instincts of the Jackals and Hyenas to avoid this desert and would have to bring them the manna and quail like he brought the Israelites with little pools of water. They soon developed faith if they followed this hapless group they would get some magical good food before they died.

Smith wanted to show that his God could get them to survive on a home built boat for an 18,000mile voyage without stopping for water or supplies in a great calm. Not easy in a great calm unless that magic brass ball could extend its spindles where they became oars and at the same time purify the ocean water so they could drink; if the magic ball could put hooks and bait on the end of the spindle/oars he might bring them a catch of fresh fish over the two years of ocean calm. Mormons believe God is a God of miracles they just don’t see as much any more of the kind of miracles that was commonplace for Nephi and the rest of God’s chosen folks.

He wanted his faithful to know that God could make brass without the need for smelting zinc and copper; he actually made a whole stack of brass plates for Laban when everyone else was using tin and copper to make bronze. He would teach Nephi to do the same with Gold maybe mixed with copper. He would show Nephi how to make swords of the finest steel. If you think it was easy in the desert of Oman to find a rock with iron ore in it and make a furnace to smelt into raw iron and fashion some kind of tools that needed no sharpening to make a sea going ship to carry 30 people with water and provisions to last them 2 or more years, if you think this was easy even for Nephi, it wasn’t, especially with his brothers thinking he couldn’t do it and wouldn’t work while he was off praying to the Lord to get instructions, this was very challenging! Even his wife thought he was nuts! This was certainly an exciting time in history, or fantasy run amuck.

We have no idea of the narrative in the book of Lehi from the plates of Lehi that was on the lost manuscript that took the story line to the reign of King Benjamin about 124 BC a period of 475 years. We know by Smith’s mother’s memoirs how devastated he was at that loss. But con artists are anything but dimwitted and he took about 10 months to find his best solution, but, like all cons, even the best make mistakes and this was a long complicated one. His main concern was that whoever possessed the lost manuscript could come forward to discredit whatever the replacement turned out to be.

Smith was lucky that school teacher Oliver Cowdery was a boarder at the home of his parents and was one who believed in magic and was fascinated about what he heard about Joseph. Hearing that Joseph was prepared to go forward and needed a new scribe, Oliver presented himself. Smith figured out the best possible solution, but the logistics were mind boggling covering the lost 475 years and then make it seem possible for the last of the Nephite leaders, Mormon and son Moroni, to get the new 475 yrs of history back into the record in a plausible way. This was all tricky stuff.

It would have been interesting now, to see what kind of a role Nephi played in the book of Lehi, certainly a subordinate role to Lehi. It is likely that Laman and Lemuel were the bad guys in Lehi’s record and of course the visions and the journey would be essentially the same. It is possible that in Lehi’s book his youngest son didn’t kill his brother…but that is irrelevant other than here is where ‘the end justifies the means’ got started.

Smith’s mistake or misfortune was that he didn’t read 2 Kings 24:8-17 before starting the replacement record of 1 Nephi and didn’t realize that Zedekiah wouldn’t be on the throne until 597 BC instead of 600 BC. He probably made the same error in his book of Lehi not knowing that the King of Babylon had just done a complete sacking of Jerusalem 3 months before taking thousands captive including Ezekiel, and then the Babylon King put Mattaniah on the throne and changed his name to Zedekiah.

March 597 BC,

2 Kings 24:10 “At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up against Jerusalem, and the city was besieged.

11 And Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came against the city, and his servants did besiege it.

12 And Jehoiachin the king of Judah went out to the king of Babylon, he, and his mother, and his servants, and his princes, and his officers: and the king of Babylon took him in the eighth year of his reign.

13 And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of the LORD, as the LORD had said.

14 And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valor, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.

15 And he carried away Jehoiachin to Babylon, and the king’s mother, and the king’s wives, and his officers, and the mighty of the land, those carried he into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon.

16 And all the men of might, even seven thousand, and craftsmen and smiths a thousand, all that were strong and apt for war, even them the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon.

17 ¶ And the king of Babylon made Mattaniah his father’s brother king in his stead, and changed his name to Zedekiah.

Had Smith read this chapter in 2 King 24 he certainly would need to re-think the whole first chapter of his book. If all the craftsmen and smiths were gone, no doubt the house of wealthy Laban was ransacked and certainly the valuable bronze was taken along with the gold and silver. There was no gold or silver anymore at Lehi’s home to bargain with, if only ‘the poorest sort of the people of the land’ remained. Certainly Lehi’s 4 sons were part of the 10,000 strong young men that the new NIV Study Bible calls ‘and fighting men’ that the King of Babylon took captive a week before he put Zedekiah on the throne in 597 BC, not 600 BC! (Babylonian records!)

For those seeking truth we have the dilemma of Lehi going through the streets of Jerusalem preaching to the poorest people left by the Babylon King, that they better repent or bad things are going to happen and of course after the disaster that just happened a few weeks before, they didn’t believe him… what kind of a prophet was Lehi not even knowing that the prophet Ezekiel was among the captives! Smith, Lehi and Nephi knew nothing of what in real life happened around the people living in Jerusalem in March of 597 BC. Lehi, Nephi didn’t know because his fictitious characters only knew what their creator knew, NOT MUCH!

We hear nothing about how Lehi and his family along with Ishmael and his family including Laban and his servants all escaped this terrible sacking of Jerusalem with everything of value gone as plunder to Babylon, including gold, silver, seeds, grain, fruits, etc. And the 10,000 of their top people would have included Laban, Zoram, Ishmael and sons, and sons of Lehi, if they had existed.

To compound this, Nephi blithely tells us in the first year of Zedekiah’s reign he and his family are being chased out of Jerusalem because Lehi was preaching that bad things might happen to Jerusalem. The weeks before Lehi was supposed to leave were cataclysmic for everyone in Jerusalem! Yet, Nephi was supposed to calmly go to the market and buy seeds of every kind, get tents, etc. His older brothers would be still hiding somewhere to escape being taken prisoners. The sons of Ishmael would be doing the same, yet no mention by Nephi of the very narrow escape.

If Laban’s whole life had been dedicated to God with daily inspiration to translate God’s Holy Word into the heathen Egyptian language, and miracle of miracles, the King of Babylon’s men who were ordered to take as spoils of war all valuables as well as foodstuff, and the ‘brass plates’ were not found; it seems that since Laban’s life was now ruined by the sacking, and the whole purpose of his grandfather and father’s life was to find a safe place in Jerusalem for Laban, so that for the last 40 years he would become literate in Hebrew and Egyptian in order to get the Hebrew Torah ready for his brother to take to America, (by sneaking the holy scrolls out of the temple by night) that he might as well go with the plates to teach Nephi and his brothers to read and write Hebrew and Egyptian. Wouldn’t that be a better solution for God/Smith than turning Nephi into a killer, saying it’s better to murder your uncle, even when a nation is going to dwindle in unbelief anyway. This sets a dangerous precedent for the God of this Cult.

1Nephi 5:17 “That these plates of brass should go forth unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people who were of his seed.” The Brass Plates never ended up anywhere!

There are so many contradictions about Uncle Laban and the brass plates. How could he command 50 as Nephi says in 1Nephi 3:31 if they are all now captives in Babylon and Laban’s riches are gone?

How could Nephi talk of going to their home and getting all their gold, silver and precious things to bribe Laban if it was all gone in the looting and sacking of Jerusalem and surrounding area that just took place? If 10,000 were taken captive and only the poorest people remained how could Nephi write what he writes in Ch 3?

It just doesn’t pass the smell test!

How could he be a wicked man if he kept the record so up-to-date that he includes records of the Jews that included writings up to the reign of King Zedekiah? (1Nephi 5:12) If it had that, then it would have the sacking of Jerusalem under the reign of Zedekiah’s nephew two months earlier that would make the first 5 chapters of 1Nephi utter nonsense! In fact if you analyze Nephi is supposed to have written unedited by, the ‘so called’ Mormon, you find it weird to say the least. This Nephi record is totally lost in the story with the record of the Kings replacing it for hundreds of years, but then magically appears again in the cave of Mormon when Smith needed it to be found in the records as a replacement for the lost book of Lehi. 1st and 2nd Nephi are full of ambiguities and smoke and mirrors. To contain all that they contain, Nephi would needed to have written it very late in life. There is no way he would write it as a contemporary account and after the horrendous sacking of Jerusalem, he wouldn’t have ignored that and pretend both he and his father were having wonderful visions and visitations by angels while everyone else was suffering! The story doesn’t have a prayer of ringing true with the lack of current knowledge by the writer!

Smith was winging the beginning and everything else. He knew he needed the record not to be in Hebrew, or he would be found out. To have a plausible story would be impossible. The idea of someone translating the sacred scrolls of the Jewish Temple into a heathen tongue would be blasphemy! No self respecting Scribe or Levite Priest would even entertain such a thought. They were the only literate people for Centuries.

Smith doesn’t even attempt to give a halfway plausible reason. Laban, from the tribe of Manasseh would not be entitled to be a part of the school for Levite Scribes. He would be lucky to have a house in the land of Judah along with Lehi. Laban, Lehi and Nephi would be lucky to find someone to teach them to read and write even Hebrew. Why would anyone want to learn to read or write if they were not of the scribe profession? Life was too hard!

Yet, in Smith’s fantasy, Nephi at the age of 15 could read and write both Hebrew and Egyptian, he was an expert archer with a steel bow; he was a master builder so he could build the Solomon temple in the land of Nephi and of course he was a master sailor and shipbuilder as well, with the ability to forge tools for such tasks out of rocks in the desert. We never hear about how he conned the Levite Priest to let a Manasseh boy inside to study the architecture.

One of the reasons Smith/Lehi gives for wanting to get the Jewish record was to be able to continue to follow the Mosaic Law. The Law of Moses cannot be practiced without the Priesthood that only Levites were ordained to hold. So, come on, Jo, why couldn’t Laban be a Levite Priest and if a relative of Lehi had to write it so he could know what tribe he was from, is a contradiction to Hebrew tradition. The first thing a young Hebrew boy is taught is the tribe he belongs to. Lehi would have had to hear from his father how his great-grandfather came from Manasseh’s tribe lands to Jerusalem in 726 BC. There were a few who escaped just after all of Samaria was killed or taken captive to the North. (The Lost 10 Tribes) Some of Manasseh who escaped and came to Jerusalem for the Passover in the year 716 BC with King Hezekiah might have stayed.

With a date of 726 BC we find in II Chronicles 30:11 “Nevertheless divers of Asher and Manasseh and of Zebulun humbled themselves, and came to Jerusalem.” This would be the last chance for the great-grandfather of Lehi and Laban to leave the land of their inheritance and come to Jerusalem.

But the point here getting the Jewish record, even in Egyptian still called for Levites to perform the ordinances in the Temple. It would be totally pointless for Nephi to spend time with such few workers to build a Solomon like temple that took Solomon 7 years with tens of thousand of workers, if there were no Levite Priests to officiate. Just like Smith had John the Baptist return to give them the Priesthood, he could have Aaron return for Nephi or Jacob…right!

Nice try, Smith but it still doesn’t pass the smell test even though your followers today do a great job of obfuscating all your mistakes.

You don’t even have to be a scholar if you read the Old Testament and reread 2 Kings 24 with a March 597 BC date, no one can take the Book of Mormon seriously as actual events in history. So we do not have to search the Americas for evidence of Nephites ever having been here and have to conclude the aborigines were mongoloids that came from Mongolia, some of whom stayed in Alaska to become the Eskimo while others continued south to eventually people both continents. Nothing to do with Israelites!

So apologists like Wayne May and countless others at F.A.R.M.S. are programmed to perpetuate a lie that they hope will someday give them Godhood!

The angel in 1Nephi 19:8 compounds the dating problem further by announcing that the birth of Christ will happen exactly 600 years from the time Lehi leaves Jerusalem. If he left during the reign of Zedekiah that started in April of 597 BC which Nephi states boldly in the 4th verse of his book, then 600 years is April 3 AD….or

The dates would be even more messed up if Smith didn’t have the Nephites add 30 days to their calendar every three years to compensate for the Jews Lunar Calendar. Of course there is no mention of this. After 600 yrs the angel is off by about 16 yrs.

Smith obviously had some help with the Book of Mormon from the School Teacher, Oliver Cowdery who was his last scribe and penned the final version of that book and became the second ‘Elder’ in Smith’s church. His first scribe, Martin Harris, who mortgaged his farm to publish the book with the hope of making a lot of money, spent more time at the job but in the end, lost all of the manuscript that he penned covering the first 475 years of history supposedly ‘translated’ from the gold plates of Lehi. Thus proving that Smith’s God wasn’t any smarter than Smith and couldn’t outwit an uneducated farmer’s wife! The LDS ‘Prophets’ following Smith have made no serious attempts to recover the lost 475 years of religious history detailed in the book of Lehi.

It is obviously not a ‘translation’ in the sense the term implies when you do not have to look at the writing you are attempting to ‘translate’. There has been speculation as to just how Smith created this ‘translation’ but all agree it wasn’t by him looking at and trying to read any ancient text.

There is no question that Smith was a charismatic, imaginative fellow with a capacity to convince ordinary people of almost anything. He was known around Palmyra as one who lived by his ‘wits’ and branded as a ‘money digger’ who claimed to be able to find treasures of silver and gold in the ground and used what he called a ‘seer’ stone placed in his hat (that he found while digging a neighbor’s well) in his attempts. His wife and his first scribe claim he dictated to them pages of his ‘translation’ while looking at this same ‘peep’ stone placed in his hat with his face covering the opening.

In the memoirs of his mother Lucy Mack Smith we find the following: Lucy Mack Smith, History of Joseph Smith, p.83

“During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life among them.”

This was before the Book of Mormon was written, so it seems Smith was capable with his imagination of creating a story about the aborigines but limited to his own learning and creativity and the ignorance of his listeners.

Smith had a year or more to formulate his ideas about the Book of Mormon story line, from the time he claimed the angel Moroni showed him the hiding place of the gold plates at the hill Cumorah, not far from his home, to his first attempts at dictating text to Martin Harris. Among Smith’s talents could have been the ability of a photographic memory. However that may be, when farmer Martin came back to the Smith house without the manuscript that he needed to show his wife to convince her the book would be worth mortgaging the farm for future royalties, he found his wife was dead set against him being involved with Smith in any scheme. The belief is that she hid the manuscript so well that neither Martin or God could find it.

Lucy’s memoirs tells us the scene when Martin returned without the manuscript: Lucy Mack Smith, History of Joseph Smith, p.128

“At length he told Martin to go back and search again. “No”; said Martin, “it is all in vain; for I have ripped open beds and pillows; and I know it is not there.” “Then must I,” said Joseph, “return with such a tale as this? I dare not do it. And how shall I appear before the Lord? Of what rebuke am I not worthy from the angel of the Most High?”

I besought him not to mourn so, for perhaps the Lord would forgive him, after a short season of humiliation and repentance. But what could I do to comfort him, when he saw all the family in the same situation of mind as himself; for sobs and groans, and the most bitter lamentations filled the house. However, Joseph was more distressed than the rest, as he better understood the consequences of disobedience. And he continued pacing back and forth, meantime weeping and grieving, until about sunset, when, by persuasion, he took a little nourishment.:” [If we can believe the subsequent record, Smith’s God had foreseen this and had already made preparations. See D&C 10]

Smith had about 10 months to find a solution to his new dilemma before his next and final scribe, Oliver Cowdery, arrived on the scene. Oliver lodged at Smith’s parents home while teaching school where he heard of the ‘gold plates’ and maybe the possibility of Smith needing a new scribe.

Smith knew he couldn’t possibly produce another manuscript even close to what had been lost and convinced his God of the futility of trying to do so. The idea that Smith came up with to have another ‘history’ of the same period from someone other than Lehi, the father of Nephi, was a great idea. Lehi was the original leader of the group and whose name was used for the plates and book that was lost. This clever idea of having Nephi write his own record just called for a lot of back tracking for everyone involved including Smith’s God. Nephi dies of old age at about 50 plus years into the lost history with over 400 more years to account for. Smith didn’t give all of the ‘translated’ manuscript to Martin to show his wife and he tells us that he was already into the King Benjamin part of the story at about 124 BC.

This is where things really get tricky. The story is predicated on the timeline of leaving Jerusalem at 600 BC, where Nephi also states that it is during the first year of the reign of King Zedekiah. Modern history tells us Zedekiah didn’t ascend the throne until 596-7 BC, about 3 years later. The Bible tells us that all the sons of Zedekiah were put to death at Riblah on the captivity march to Babylon, but Smith tells us one escaped with his entourage and came to America. (With no details on this) One could believe, reading Smith’s King James Bible of his day, that the year 600 BC for Zedekiah could be a good guess. In 2Kings it shows dates of 600 and 599. The 600BC date is important because an angel tells Nephi that Christ would come exactly 600 years from the time his father left Jerusalem but with Zedekiah already King. Nephites relied on these ‘facts’ to keep their faith strong in Christ’s coming with the King James Biblical dating.

Dating is thus critical to the Book of Mormon, so it would be critical for Smith to know that the Jewish calendar was lunar and the year consisted of 354 days. The 11 day difference from the solar year was corrected every 3 years by the Jews in Jerusalem. The scribes would have to add 30+ days in order for their seasons to come when the calendar said they would. They had Spring planting Festivals where the Festival date needed to come in the Spring. There is no indication that any Book of Mormon writer knew this, including of course, Smith. This would make the dating of Christ’s birth off by 18 years or more. (600 times 11 or 6600 days) But that’s not the issue here. (But, an amazing fact that most people do not know is that the Mayan Indian calendar of that time in Central America was more accurate than our calendars of today!)

We are concerned about how and when Mormon would be able, logically, to have this replacement record availalbe for his abridgment right where Smith needed it with the addition of the small book ‘Words of Mormon’ to explain. (Smith called this replacement record his “small account of the prophets from Jacob“, (WOM 3, Jacob would be Nephi’s younger brother.) and that needed to be in the cave as well with the tons of other plates. Smith and his God get confused about which records are which.

Smith tells us in the preface of the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon that the lost manuscript contained an abridgment by Mormon of the book of Lehi from the plates of Lehi. “I would inform you that I translated, by the gift and power of God, and caused to be written, one hundred and sixteen pages, the which I took from the Book of Lehi, which was an accountabridged from the plates of Lehi, by the hand of Mormon.” The confusion is compounded in a ‘revelation’ claimed by Smith in his Doctrine & Covenants, Sec. 10:44 where God tells Smith that “Behold, they have only got a part, or an abridgment of the account of Nephi” Why would a smart God call it an ‘account of Nephi’ when Smith in his preface calls it the Book of Lehi from the plates of Lehi?

The confusion goes further when Mormon tries to explain what is going on in his Aladdin cave. Mormon 4:23 tells us Mormon went 900 miles all the way back through the jungles from Nicaragua (Desolation) to Columbia so he could get the ‘many wagon loads’ of gold plates, without any indication from God that God wanted him to do it in order to make a 1% abridgment of all the records. These records at hill Shim needed to include a record never before spoken of that needed no abridgment by Mormon.

There was no forewarning by God to Mormon what the purpose was for Mormon to bring these tons of Gold Plates to Cumorah in the last possible minute, other than to load the Nephites down with tons of gold plates that wouldn’t allow them to escape from the savage Lamanites who would kill them and keep the gold. Mormon 5:7 “And it came to pass that we did again take flight, and those whose flight was swifter than the Lamanites did escape, and those whose flight did not exceed the Lamanites’ were swept down and destroyed.”

The other story is that God is smart and he put fools gold in the cave at hill Shim along with the true gold plates and the slowest and most wicked of the Nephites were given this fools gold in their knapsacks and when the savage Lamanites caught and killed them, they started fighting among themselves for the fools gold and stopped pursuing the Nephites so they could get the sacred records safely to hill Cumorah. Ha! You see what faith promoting stories can be concocted! (I went to SLC my last year as a Mormon teacher in Sunday School, (and as a former returned missionary) to pay a visit to the then LDS President Spencer Kimball. I saw a book in the waiting room called ‘Faith Promoting Fiction’ it seems Mormons can make up all kinds of fancy tales, especially in LDS Testimony Meetings, of stories that reinforce the Mormon faith, and that’s OK.)

It is easy to digress in this tangled web of smoke and mirrors. But if we get back in our Aladdin cave at Cumorah with Smith as the story teller, he knows he has the rough drafts of his histories completed, including Mormon’s chapter 6&7 describing the final battle. At this point Smith doesn’t realize that he gave Mormon no commandment or time to review and abridge thousands of Nephite records except in the abridgment itself. And the abridgment couldn’t be made until Mormon found a major gold mine, had the time and motivation to make many gold plates that he tells us about making, more than half way through the abridgment! (3Nephi 5:11)

Smith thinks he just needs to finesse a new first 475 years and get back to his retained King Benjamin manuscript. Smith has General Mormon of the Nephite army, from the time he was a teenager, so busy with battles that he keeps the Holy Ghost waiting at hill Shim an extra 10 years for Mormon to pick up the plates of Nephi and engrave his observations with reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics that he taught himself. We have to presume Ammaron left him an empty gold plate or two to do so.

It was not anticipated that he wouldn’t start those ‘observations’ or ‘abridgment’ until after the last great battle when he was all alone in his Aladdin cave with plenty of time. (For those who don’t believe that God could make Mormon an Aladdin like cave will have a hard time believing any of this!) If Mormon God had looked in his Seer Stone he would have known this, and didn’t have to risk losing the whole history on the plates of Nephi by Mormon carrying them into battle over thousands of miles for 40 years! (Mormons are taught that if they go to the ‘Mormon Kingdom’ in heaven, each will be assigned their own (3G iphone5) or ‘Seer Stone’.) Mormon could have picked them up with the other plates 35 years later as described in Mormon 4:23.

Based on what Smith said in the preface to the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, Mormon should be telling us of a commandment to abridge the complete Nephite history of tons of records. (Otherwise, what was the point of bringing them 5,000 miles from Medellin, Columbia?) He might have followed Ammaron’s advice and recorded what he observed during his lifetime. (Mormon 1:4) But we find in 3Nephi 5:16-17 that he made the abridgment first, with plates he made with his own hands! “16 Therefore I do make my record from the accounts which have been given by those who were before me, until the commencement of my day; 17 And then I do make a record of the things which I have seen with mine own eyes.” He tells us in vs. 11 “And behold, I do make the record on plates which I have made with mine own hands.”

Smith has Mormon start his record after 4Nephi, according to vs. 17, above. Mormon 1:1 “And now I, Mormon, make a record of the things which I have both seen and heard, and call it the Book of Mormon.” The fatal mistake of Smith was not having Mormon get a revelation from God telling him that his great mission in life was not to just make a book about ‘the things which I have both seen and heard‘, but to make a 1% abridgment of the 1,000 year history! Obviously there was no rush. Smith could let Mormon live as long as he wanted. He let Amaleki and Ammaron live to be about 300 years!

But what Smith can’t do, if he wants to gain credibility, is not give a command for Mormon to find and retrieve the Nephite records for the specific purpose of abridging that record, and this needs to be part of what Mormon ‘heard‘ from God! Smith can still have Mormon record it as what he has ‘seen and heard’ 40 years later, but it must be included for Mormon to have had the motivation to find a gold mine, etc, etc.

There would be no point and it would be too risky for Mormon to take the plates of Nephi from their safety at hill Shim with the sacred history on it if Mormon had no command or time to abridge it before the last battle at Cumorah 50 years later! Smith missed his best opportunity when he had Mormon quit the army for 12 years with nothing to do. (Mormon 3:11) That would have been the ideal time, for Smith to have God give him a revelation for his son not to be a missionary somewhere, (Moroni 8:1) but to help him retrieve all the records and have Moroni mine for gold in Nicaragua while Mormon studies the records and makes his abridgment. God could tell him that he didn’t have to go back the 900 miles to Columbia because God knew just which records he wanted abridged and could easily whisk them to Mormon’s doorstep either in Nicaragua or Cumorah!

But no, Smith has another less credible story of Mormon engraving his own life story after abridging the 1,000 year history with plates he made with his own hands. The Words of Mormon contradict all of that. Now, Mormon had to finish chapters 6&7 after the battles where he was wounded. (Moroni just makes up the lie in chapter 8:3, 5, that his father was slain in battle when he hadn’t even begun his abridgment, and needed a few years just to study tons of records, and wait for God to give guidance.)

Based on the 1830 edition, after his son, along with the other survivors, left wounded Mormon alone in the cave, when Mormon was feeling better after the angel brought him food and water, he would have to pick up the plates of Lehi and realize this contained the beginning of the story and start his abridgment called ‘the book of Lehi’. He would often stop and wonder how he had failed as a father to have Moroni leave without even saying goodbye and with only chapters 1-5 on the ‘few plates’ he gave him before the battle. (Mormon 6:6) But, if we can believe what Mormon says in 3Nephi 5:17, then he hasn’t even begun the abridgment from the time of Lehi to Mormon’s day, and his first 5 chapters can’t be on those ‘few plates’.

Smith certainly had Mormon chapters 1-7 and Moroni’s chapters 8 and 9 completed before he dictated his two page book called ‘Words of Mormon’ and had Moroni quote a lot of New Testament stuff to be used for conversion to his shortly to be formed new church. He unwittingly quoted the last verses in KJB Mark’s gospel 16:15 verbatim “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature”, not knowing that later editions of the Bible will delete this and what comes after as not being in the oldest manuscripts. Smith goes on in Mormon 9:24 “And he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.” Smith and Cowdery had the nerve to copy verbatim from Smith’s KJ Bible and continues with vs. 16: “And these signs shall follow...etc” with another verbatim quote from what modern scholars have discarded as not being the words of Jesus! (Can anyone imagine the implications of finding a word for word version on plates written in Egyptian on the American continent in 400 AD with the writer never having heard of the gospel writer Mark or the words ascribed to him? Wow!)

With full confidence Smith inserts the ‘Words of Mormon’ into his record after he finished dictating his replacement record. In a convoluted ‘true story’, Mormon needed to find the plates of Lehi and start with the book of Lehi that would support what Smith wrote in the preface of the 1830 BOM edition. But here again, Smith and his God are painting a false picture. Smith doesn’t have Moroni show up during Mormon’s time in the cave in order to know that his father didn’t die in battle and was busy with records including the Jaredite record and maybe realize it would be better for a son to help his father than chase after savage Lamanites for 15 years.

But Smith has Mormon, without command, abridge the full Nephite record, and as long as the angel kept bringing food and water along with finished new gold plates ready to engrave, Mormon might as well busy himself doing something. Did Mormon lie when Smith has him say in 3Nephi 5:11 that he made the gold plates that he engraved on with his own hands? Did he do that by Alchemy or by finding a gold mine?

But contrary to what Smith says in his 1830 edition, Mormon in his ‘Words of Mormon’ doesn’t go to the plates of Lehi to start abridging the book of Lehi that Smith tells us is on the manuscript that Martin Harris lost, Mormon, instead goes to the plates of Nephi and abridges them down to the ‘reign of this king Benjamin of whom Amaleki spake.‘ To say the least, this is a very misleading and confusing verse. (WOM 3) If we take literally what Mormon/Smith says, he is saying that he just abridged the very record that he now intends to insert in this same record!

To cover his butt, Smith, in his replacement record refers to more than one set of ‘plates of Nephi’, if there is one thing for sure that you can say about the Book of Mormon that Mark Twain hasn’t already said, is it is full of ambiguities. The LDS church maintains that Mormon didn’t abridge the replacement record, but inserted it in the middle of the book of Lehi without abridgment. But here Mormon says just that, that he abridged the record in which Amaleki spake.

The remaining question is; why are we not reading that the record Mormon is referring to in vs 3 that he abridged is the book of Lehi that Smith describes in his 1830 edition? Why does Mormon say that it is the record in which ‘Amaleki spake’ when the only record we know of, that Amaleki spake in, is the one that Mormon is about to insert during his abridgment of the plates of Nephi down to king Benjamin! It is surely a tangled web we weave when we attempt to deceive.

We don’t really have to be concerned about who wrote what and when, as all the tons of records were meaningless. The plates supposedly delivered to Smith were superfluous. Smith did not need to examine anything that was supposed to be written by ancient writers. Smith, along with whoever was inspiring him, just needed to have a plausible story that could be believed by people who lived by emotion or feeling, rather than fact or logic. (There are those who believe that dead Mormon was with Smith in spirit and he was reviewing all that he had written on the plates and was busy writing an English translation on the tiny egg shaped stone that Smith placed in his hat and read from.The spirit wouldn’t let the words disappear until the ‘spirit’ saw that what the scribe wrote was correct.) Good luck with your Mormon belief, High Priest Mitt Romney!

Smith knew that his replacement story would have to be essentially the same with the same events because Martin Harris knew the story line of the book of Lehi. So the events in the desert would have to be essentially the same only now God would have to give any important revelations to Nephi as well as his father or his father would have to give Nephi the details of his visions that Nephi needed to remember for 40 years before being inspired to write it down on different sets of plates. But this isn’t Mormon’s problem in 385 AD. It’s a big credibility problem for the book’s author along with his premise. (It just seems so much easier for God to prevent Lucy Harris from stealing the manuscript her husband brought home.)

It is a tough sell anyway you look at it. Most of the objective scholars who spend anytime trying to make heads or tails out of the book, give it up as a lost cause. Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and Brigham Young are all on record describing the Aladdin cave at hill Cumorah filled with not only tons of gold plates stacked up everywhere but also including the sword of Laban that someone had to hand down for a thousand years.

Mormon/Smith needs to find a reason why Mormon needed to risk everything to go back 900 miles of mountains and jungle through enemy lines to dig up these tons of records and find some way to transport them without mules, horses or oxen over 5,000 miles. If Mormon had a son leading 10,000 in the Nephite army, why didn’t he get him to help his 70 year old father? He had to do this when he knew that his God could just whisk them to anyplace in the world he wanted them, just by exercising faith as God did when he removed them back from hill Cumorah to hill Shim in Columbia. (Smith has a whole mountain moved (Mt Zerin Ether 12:30) in his Jaredite history.) Or, move them an extra 50 ft deeper in the earth at Cumorah in order to keep them safe. Don’t laugh, Smith tells us in his book how god can make money and metal objects ‘slippery’. When they are buried, God or the Devil can slide them through the earth wherever they desire. (Mormon 1:18, Helaman 13:33-37)

Smith loved to improvise and it passed for ‘inspiration’ for a lot of his followers. But when it is written down, you are stuck with the consequence of your written words. By writing that Mormon returns from Nicaragua through 900 miles of mountain jungles of enemy lines and back again to collect tons of sacred Nephite records with no mode of transportation for them, makes Mormon/God look stupid, if these records would not be used for some useful purpose!

Mormon supposedly took the plates of Nephi from this hill 40 years earlier and was supposed to write his observations on them. If he is now to abridge this record, he has to find time to study it and find time and a place to mine ore and make it into plates after he was directed by God to do so. In Mormon 3:16 he tells us he has quit the army and has become: “…I did stand as an idle witness to the things which I saw and heard…” If we can believe the story, Moroni, Mormon’s son is a leader of ten thousand in the Nephite army that his dad just quit as commander because of their wickedness.

Moroni is later to become and ‘angel’, so if his father quit because of the wicked army, what about Moroni? If he and his father were the only righteous ones, why didn’t they work together picking up the tons of records from hill Shim during the 10 years of idleness that Mormon describes? Certainly Moroni could help mine for gold so that his father could use his time to study the records and then use the ore and still be able say he made the plates with his own hands?

Mormon uses the next 5 verses to preach to the gentiles and the tribes of Israel that he seems sure will read his remarks. Chapter 4 is devoted t0 his 10-12 years of’ ‘idle witnessing’ of the fights between two wicked groups of Jews with his son leading ten thousand of them. During this time he writes about 30 verses of preaching and observations of wickedness and battles. (But of course he could have written nothing until after the battle at Cumorah.)

This 12 years as an ‘idle witness’ would have been a great time for Mormon to study and abridge the plates of Nephi that he has successfully kept from being stolen from his army tent by his wicked followers. He could have written about any revelation telling him to do so. God could have told him that he needed what was still in hill Shim before starting this monumental effort. Had this ‘storyteller’ or ‘God’ known in advance, the year before Mormon quit because of extreme wickedness, Mormon and his son could have picked up the rest of the plates at hill Shim more easily when the Lamanites returned to their own lands as described in Mormon 3:7. Mormon/God still risks losing the records along with lives, by loading Nephites down with these tons of records. (Mormon 5:7 “…and those whose flight did not exceed the Lamanites’ were swept down and destroyed.”

Smith tries to have it both ways in his tangled web. He invents an only son of Mormon named Moroni, someone who will be almost more famous than anyone connected to Mormonism. He turns this character into one of his biggest liars by first having him lie about how his father died and what his own life consisted of. Mormon introduces us to his son Moroni in Mormon 6:6 in 385 AD by telling us he gave his son a ‘few plates’ before the big battle. What exactly they were and for what purpose, will never be known!

Mormon continues by describing the battle and how he was wounded in vs. 10, and in vs. 11, and tells us that only 24 Nephites were left living, including his son Moroni. And in vs. 12 talks of the ten thousand of the army, led by his son Moroni, and are now all dead and gone to hell. He continues the description that he would have had to engrave on the plates of Nephi after the last battle in the Aladdin cave when both the Lamanites and the surviving Nephites along with his son had departed.

This is all Smith/Mormon had written about Moroni before the loss of the book of Lehi manuscript. Things were always in a creative state of flux in the head of Smith. At one point, early on, Smith’s brother is on record that the angel who first appeared to his brother Joseph, was named Nephi, not Moroni. Be that as it may, if Moroni is be a major character in Smith’s tangled web, more must be added to the then existing story, hopefully without contradiction.

It would appear that Smith had Moroni’s chapters 8&9 in his father’s book finished before the insertion of the Words of Mormon, after the insertion of the replacement record. The illogical sequences are mind boggling. Let me make the point of the ‘little’ that Mormon says about his son and its significance. Obviously Mormon did not go southward as claimed by Moroni in Mormon 8:2-3 and was not killed as stated. Smith should have fixed this, but he didn’t. He was too interested in getting the next chapter finished that would be the basis of his new church.

But, we see the compounded absurdities when we think of how we reconcile the addition of Moroni’s chapters 7, 8&9 by Smith, that he thought would hopefully give more of a connection between father and son. For one who studies the book, it just creates more absurdities. First, there is no time and place for Mormon to have met a woman to marry as commander of the Nephite army continually moving thousands of miles fighting mostly losing battles. In Mormon 2:16 he tells us in the 345th year he was fighting and had been forced north to the city of Jashon near the hill Shim. He was 10 when he was told by Ammaron to pick up the plates of Nephi at Shim when he was 24. It is now 23 years later and Mormon is maybe 34 instead of 24 and tells us that he sees nothing but wickedness around him. He tells us in vs. 18 and 19 that he finally picked up the plates of Nephi and that he wrote his observations on them and they contained more complete descriptions of the wickedness that abounded. He tells us further that what he is currently writing on is not fuller account he wrote on the plates of Nephi. (After the battle.)

A plausible sequence could be that Mormon could have written his fuller eyewitness account on the plates of Nephi after the book of 4Nephi. If that fuller account contained the command to abridge the complete plates of Nephi including his fuller eyewitness account, he should have included it in his abridgment that he says he he didn’t start until he had finished the complete 1,000 year history. All of this could only have happened at Cumorah where it would have been difficult for Mormon to find enough gold to do the job. Or, of course, in Smith’s head in 1827.

And is this all taking place as flash backs written in the cave at Cumorah? It is unlikely that Mormon would be able to give dates based on the coming of Christ without having studied the plates of Nephi. This is another argument that Mormon wrote nothing until he had the time and tranquility in the Aladdin cave at Cumorah. He could have told us he did this when he quit the army in Nicaragua, but he didn’t. He could have told us God told him to go back and pick up all the records, but he didn’t. He could have told us his son Moroni quit the army that his father no longer commanded and helped him mine for ore, but he didn’t!

In Mormon 2:29 we are told that a treaty was made by Mormon with his enemies when he was about 40 for the Nephites to inherit the lands north, starting at Panama. Mormon is 40, we hear of no wife or son and Mormon is constantly on the move with very wicked people. Now Smith comes up with the bright idea that Mormon has a son who is old enough to have not only heard him speak in a Jewish Synagogue but wrote down all the words in Egyptian of his father’s plagiarism of Paul’s ‘faith, hope and charity’ epistle to the Corinthians in the New Testament. This, Smith inserts as Moroni chapter 7. He does this without checking in his story where this could have conceivably taken place. No one taught Mormon or Moroni to read and write in two complicated languages. In which of the battlefield tents was Moroni conceived and with what woman? Who cared for the infant and young child Moroni? Women didn’t read or write, so who had the time and knew the languages to teach Mormon and/or Moroni?

Chapter 8 starts out by Moroni telling us it is an epistle from his father shortly after Moroni entered the ministry. Now Moroni is suddenly a grown man teaching somewhere where wickedness didn’t abound and they were only concerned about the Catholic teaching of infant baptism. Wow!

First, how did Mormon’s epistle get to Moroni and how did Moroni’s epistle get to the retreating Mormon with his idolatrous, wicked people to tell him of their disputations about infant baptism? Where in north or south America could he have been with his ‘Ministry’ where such things were being discussed? His father is about to quit leading the army because of its wickedness and just observe what was happening. Mormon says that Moroni led ten thousand of these wicked soldiers. Just when did Moroni leave the ministry to lead soldiers that commit awful things? Why didn’t he quit the army when his dad did and help him write the record? When and where did he learn to read and write both Hebrew and Egyptian?

What Smith didn’t think out was, if there was no ‘directive’ from God to make a 1% abridgment of the whole Nephite records except in Mormon’s abridgment itself, then the only conclusion one can come to is that this abridgment was all made after the last battle when Mormon had been deserted by everyone and all his people were dead and he was left alone to die in his Aladdin cave. This vital point is never apparent during the abridgment, especially in 3Nephi when Mormon identifies himself as the abridger and commentator of the record in 3Nephi 5:11-12 on plates that he has made with his own hands. (11 “And behold, I do make the record on plates which I have made with mine own hands”.) If he made them while still in Nicaragua he fails to tell us about his command to do so.

Palmyra is not known for its abundance of gold. Smith has got himself boxed in with Mormon doing the abridgment before any commandment and before he says he is going to do the record of his observations during his life. So Mormon must leave his Aladdin cave and look for gold, mine it, refine it, make it into plates, etc, but first make a pick and shovel while looking for an available vein of gold somewhere. He tells us nothing about these activities or that his son Moroni would have been very helpful if he had not abandoned him. 3Nephi 5:16 “Therefore I do make my record from the accounts which have been given by those who were before me, until the commencement of my day; 17 And then I do make a record of the things which I have seen with mine own eyes.” He tells us in vs. 15 that it is a record from the time of Lehi, and if we can believe Smith, starting with the book of Lehi from the plates of Lehi. “15 Yea, a small record of that which hath taken place from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem, even down until the present time.”

When we examine the written word, it just doesn’t ring true that Mormon all by himself, wounded, 80 years old, scavenging for food and water, finds gold, makes plates, finds engraving tools all before getting any instructions from God as to what God wanted. It certainly sounds like Mormon is continuing his narrative of his life after he finishes 4Nephi, but then what could possibly be on the ‘few plates’ that he supposedly gave his new found son? (Mormon 6:6 “…these few plates which I gave unto my son Moroni.” This is the first time our storyteller Smith allowed 75 year old Mormon to mention that he had a son named Moroni who was a leader of ten thousand in the Nephite army that Mormon commanded.

In Alma 43:16 Mormon writes in his abridgment: “Now, the leader of the Nephites, or the man who had been appointed to be the chief captain over the Nephites —now the chief captain took the command of all the armies of the Nephites—and his name was Moroni; 17 And Moroni took all the command, and the government of their wars. And he was only twenty and five years old when he was appointed chief captain over the armies of the Nephites.” In real life, how can any father of an only son named Moroni not mention this fact when he mentions the name of a former leader of the Nephites with the same name at least 20 more time in just this one chapter!

This would be the first time Mormon saw that anyone had been called Moroni among the Nephites other than his son! In Alma 44 Mormon writes the name Moroni another 13 times. There are 13 more in Alma 46. Five more times in Alma 48 and 9 more in Alma 49. There are 18 in Alma 50 and if that was not enough Mormon read about a City being built with the name Moroni, the very city that his son was named after! And still silence from this cold uncaring father. Alma 51 has another 11 instances of Moroni, the leader of the Nephites being mentioned fighting the Nephites’ enemies. So we can only conclude after mentioning the name 91 times in 5 chapters that the only reason for Mormon not to mention the connection with his son would be that Smith hadn’t yet thought of creating a son for Mormon with the name Moroni! Mormon was now old and in the cave, abandoned by son and the 23 survivors. Was he just too ashamed and bitter to associate his son with such a superb leader, the first Moroni?

Just so the reader knows, the references to this Moroni continue 99 more times until he gives his command to his son Moronihah. A grand total of 190 times. One would think with a son called Moronihah that would trigger a reference to Mormon’s son, but Moronihah references continues for another 16 times with no connection to Mormon’s son Moroni.

Smith or Cowdery concluded after a couple chapters of the book of Moroni that this father-son thing in Mormon chapter 6 was very tenuous. Smith had invented the ‘epistle’ thing for written communication, without knowing the meaning of the word, and created fantasy emails between various leaders, and now, with father and son, in the book of Moroni.

Of course we never hear who the mother was. Mormon tells us Lehi descended from the tribe of Manasseh. (Mormon was supposed to be a pure descendant of Lehi) Lehi’s people were absorbed into the much larger Mulekite group in Zarahemla that were undoubtedly all of the tribe of Judah.

It is certain that a son of the Jewish King Zedekiah was a Jew. All of the people in Zarahemla were Jews until the small group of the Manasseh tribe led by Mosiah merged with this much larger group of Jews, it is likely Mormon married a Jewess. And it was likely that Moroni learned his Hebrew speech (Mormon 9:33) from her and was inspired to do his missionary work in the area of hill Beverly in the land northward where most of the Zedekiah/Jews had migrated. Moroni chapter 8 is unclear whether Moroni is paraphrasing his father’s plagiarism of Apostle Paul’s New Testament teaching. I believe the synagogue thing and the infant baptism in Moroni 9, were all Smith’s imagination at work. It is highly unlikely that Moroni wrote down the Synagogue sermon of his father that he kept in his vest pocket for 40 years. And it is very unlikely that Mormon would be preaching the Apostle Paul’s teaching of the New Testament in a Jewish Synagogue in Central America in 360 AD. He tells us in Mormon 3 that this was a time of extreme wickedness on both sides during his stay in the city called Desolation and he was just an ‘idle witness’.

There are so many ‘red flags’ in this book it is hard to know how to simplify. Mormon, after being chased by the savage Lamanite Indians from Columbia through jungles of present day Panama, Costa Rica and into Nicaragua, tells us in Mormon 4:23 that he was going back to maybe Medellin, Columbia (after having been an observer for 10 to 12 years where he could have started his abridgment if God/Smith had been smart enough to have him retrieve the records earlier) (Even for God, moving the plates 900 miles is easier than 5,000 miles!) so Mormon could retrieve all the records that 300 year old Ammaron hid in hill Shim when he moved them from near the temple in Bountiful to Shim. (One would think this ancient of ancients would find a convenient hill near Bountiful to carry them to, before burying the tons of gold plates.) One would also think that Mormon, if he had a son Moroni, would have taken him to help load and carry these tons of records the 8 or 9 hundred miles from Medellin, Columbia to Nicaragua. But, alas, not a word about Moroni until he appears, 10 yrs later, as leader Moroni of 10,000 soldiers in the wicked Nephite ragtag army.

Immediately after obtaining these tons of records we are told in Mormon 5:7 “And it came to pass that we did again take to flight, and those whose flight was swifter than the Lamanites’ did escape, and those whose flight did not exceed the Lamanites’ were swept down and destroyed”.

So who was inspired to load hundreds of Nephite soldiers down with tons of gold plates if they wouldn’t be able to flee as fast as a Lamanite with only a spear and loin cloth? Come on Smith, you can do better than that when God can have all the tons of records waiting in the Aladdin cave at Cumorah months before you get there with no effort at all on his part.

With Smith’s God no smarter than Smith is, no one told Mormon he didn’t have to go back 900 miles through enemy lines to get anything, God knew in advance what he would need and could select only the records that God wanted abridged. Up to that point neither God nor Smith talked about an abridgment where all the records would be necessary for Mormon to review at Cumorah or in the land of Desolation if the Mormon God wanted Mormon to do something productive during the 12 years of being an ‘idle witness’ writing 30 verses.

More on this later…or check out “Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” (Book of Mormon) at Amazon.com

]]>https://claudeheater.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/book-of-mormon-satire-ticket-to-heaven/feed/1claudeheaterTo define a terroristhttps://claudeheater.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/to-define-a-terrorist/
https://claudeheater.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/to-define-a-terrorist/#commentsSun, 11 Sep 2011 05:43:18 +0000http://claudeheater.wordpress.com/?p=73A terrorist act is performed by a terrorist for either political or religious reasons, or both. It is done without warning and without concern for the lives of innocent people and/or property. By this definition, the Mormon Christ is a terrorist in 3Nephi, chapters 8&9, he is not the forgiving Bible Christ who on the cross forgave everyone and told the thief being crucified next to him that this thief would be with him (Christ) in Paradise on that very day.

On the other hand, if somehow Jesus was not lying to the thief, we have to ask ourselves if the destruction that the ‘terrorist’ Christ caused on the American continents was somehow an awful punishment of millions of men, women and children, we ask, just how would this false Jesus know who had been naughty or nice in America when he had no knowledge of what went on in America for at least the last 34 years? Would Christ know in 10 BC that a 10 year old living in America then, was already scripted for destruction along with his family at the age of 44, so this terrorist Christ is pre judging and killing him and his family without a warning, to celebrate his crucifixion and the eventual redemption of all people? 3Nephi 8:14-16.

14 And many great and notable cities were sunk, and many were burned, and many were shaken till the buildings thereof had fallen to the earth, and the inhabitants thereof were slain, and the places were left desolate.

15 And there were some cities which remained; but the damage thereof was exceedingly great, and there were many in them who were slain.

16 And there were some who were carried away in the whirlwind; and whither they went no man knoweth, save they know that they were carried away.

The Biblical Jesus story tells us that there was 3 hours of darkness while Jesus hung on the cross from the sixth to the ninth hour. (Noon to 3:00 pm.) This would be between 1 and 3 AM when everyone is sleeping in America. Smith, as always, tries to do the Bible one better and has 3 days of darkness. He even has one of his false prophets prophesy that there would be 3 DAYS of darkness, not as they may have perceived in Jerusalem, but in the Book of Mormon it covered over all the face of the land!

3Nephi 8: 3 “And the people began to look with great earnestness for the sign which had been given by the prophet Samuel, the Lamanite, yea, for the time that there should be darkness for the space of three days over the face of the land.”

The Bible speaks of the ‘darkness’ over the land, whether it was the hemisphere we may never know. Europe or India did not record this anomaly. The Bible tells us of the Temple crack and of earthquakes, etc. after the hours of darkness when Jesus died, but Smith has all of the destruction happen while the inhabitants were waiting for the ‘sign’ of the 3 DAYS of darkness.

We are told in Helaman 12:13-15 the following: 13 Yea, and if he say unto the earth—Move—it is moved.

14 Yea, if he say unto the earth—Thou shalt go back, that it lengthen out the day for many hours—it is done;

15 And thus, according to his word the earth goeth back, and it appeareth unto man that the sun standeth still; yea, and behold, this is so; for surely it is the earth that moveth and not the sun.

Is this Smith preparing the reader for the 3 DAYS of darkness on the North and South American continents? If that would be the case why would there not be any records in Europe or Asia of the 3 days of sun? The Maya were great astronomers and had the most accurate calendar on earth, so why didn’t they record this event? The earth rotates at a little over 1,000 miles an hour. For one thing there would be no wind for those 3 days anywhere! To cause darkness over both the North and South American Continents would be a mindboggling event and for what purpose would God need to do it in America unless it was to increase the suffering from all the destruction he inflicted where no one could see to care for the injured.

Vs 11 “And there was a great and terrible destruction in the land southward.

Did our writer 2000 yrs ago have his TV on to see and describe what was happening 5,000 miles apart? Or is Smith just letting his fantasy run wild?

12 But behold, there was a more great and terrible destruction in the land northward; for behold, the whole face of the land was changed, because of the tempest and the whirlwinds, and the thunderings and the lightnings, and the exceedingly great quaking of the whole earth;

The whole chapter describes the killing and wanton destruction supposedly on an unsuspecting populace in North and South America at the time of the Biblical crucifixion of Christ and the time the Biblical Christ was in Paradise with the thief. The last recorded words of the Bible Christ recorded in Luke 23 were “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” and to the thief “Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” We can only conclude that the Bible Christ kept his word to the thief but the Book of Mormon Christ went on a rampage in America for those three days destroying the major cities and everyone in them!

Whatever the terrorist Christ in America was doing and in whatever timeframe, the Biblical Christ on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, had presumably returned from Paradise to take up his wounded body and interact with his disciples for the next 40 days in the Holy Land.

3Nephi 8:23 tells us “And it came to pass that it did last for the space of three days that there was no light seen; and there was great mourning and howling and weeping among all the people continually; yea, great were the groanings of the people, because of the darkness and the great destruction which had come upon them.”

This puts God/Christ in the awkward position to stop the rotation of the earth so that no light shone on the North and South American continents!

Wow! Don’t laugh, we are told in Book of Mormon, Helaman 12:14 that this is something that the Mormon Christ can do very easily. Primitive man will think the sun has stopped, but those with faith know that Christ has stopped the rotation of the earth for his own purposes This 3 days of darkness would reflect the 3 days before Christ appeared to Mary and the disciples in Jerusalem with none of the Gospel writers mentioning the fact that for darkness to cover America for 3 days, daylight would cover Palestine and Europe for the same 3 days without anyone noticing!

But, the Book of Mormon Christ is still terrorizing the people of America. What would we do without Smith to show us these details of the extent that the Mormon God will go to test man’s faith! Smith is finally revealing to the world the extent of all the miracles his terrorist Christ is willing to perform for mankind! Wow!

3Nephi 9:1 “And it came to pass that there was a voice heard among all the inhabitants of the earth, upon all the face of this land, crying:

2 Wo, wo, wo unto this people; wo unto the inhabitants of the whole earth except they shall repent; for the devil laugheth, and his angels rejoice, because of the slain of the fair sons and daughters of my people…

Here Smith tells us that this crucified Christ is now, not in Paradise with the thief, not with his disciples in the Holy Land, not sitting on the right hand of God, but here in Columbia, South America speaking in a language that was unknown to him, and mentioning the names of cities whose names he couldn’t possibly know, bragging about all the destruction he has caused. (Probably within hours of forgiving everyone in Palestine.) Only the farfetched storyteller Smith could dream up something like this! Not only did the ‘devil laugh’, Smith was quietly laughing at how gullible people are to believe this nonsense.

3 “Behold, that great city Zarahemla have I burned with fire, and the inhabitants thereof. (And destroyed all the sacred records the prophets have kept for 600 years! Helaman 7:10 described Nephi’s house with the tower near the market in Zarahemla, 3Nephi 1:2 tells us of putting his son 4Nephi in charge of the plates of brass (Jewish Old Testament) and all the sacred writings of the Nephites, presumably stored in or near the tower. This happened, according to Smith in BC1 and AD1 In vs. 13 we find 4Nephi having a conversation with the Mormon Christ in heaven who tells us that he would be coming out of Mary’s womb the following day!) All these gems of religious history would have been lost forever without Jo Smith! Wow!

4 And behold, that great city Moroni have I caused to be sunk in the depths of the sea, and the inhabitants thereof to be drowned. (At least 14 cities are mentioned by name, all unknown to Christ.)

5 And behold, that great city Moronihah (Moron i hah, hah!) have I covered with earth, and the inhabitants thereof, to hide their iniquities and their abominations from before my face…

15 “Behold, I am Jesus Christ the Son of God. I created the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are. I was with the Father from the beginning. I am in the Father, and the Father in me; and in me hath the Father glorified his name.”

Mosiah 15: 1 And now Abinadi said unto them: I would that ye should understand that God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people.

2 And because he dwelleth in flesh he shall be called the Son of God, and having subjected the flesh to the will of the Father, being the Father and the Son—

3 The Father, because he was conceived by the power of God; and the Son, because of the flesh; thus becoming the Father and Son—

4 And they are one God, yea, the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth.

Mosiah 16:15 Teach them that redemption cometh through Christ the Lord, who is the very Eternal Father. Amen

So through Smith we find that the Jewish God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is ultimately the Mormon terrorist Christ.

Here Smith gives us a perfect explanation of the Triune God about 150 BC or 1829 AD, take your pick..

We must remember the Bible Christ was living for 34 years in Palestine totally cut off from anything happening anywhere else in the world including the preparations in Heaven by the terrorist angels for the American massacre as outlined in the predestined scrip that the Mormon God had followed worlds without number…

There were obviously innocent women and children burned and drowned indiscriminately by Christ and his angels of death. The Mormon terrorist Christ is here speaking from the heavens so that all could hear over thousands of miles and they are bombarded with reasons why this Christ, who had no idea what had been transpiring here for 34 years, needed to ruthlessly kill and destroy here in America. He tells them many times he would have gathered them, and all Jews, as a hen gathers her chicks, but certainly not during the lifetimes of most of them because he was busy in Palestine. It is also interesting to observe that while Christ spoke mostly Aramaic during his ministry that he immediately knew the Nephite Egyptian dialect so he could converse freely with those who would listen in America. (Are there those who believe that Christ can at will, understand, speak, and think in every dialect spoken on Earth?)

In 3Nephi 10:8 we are told of the final words of the terrorist Christ at that point in time “And now it came to pass that after the people had heard these words, behold, they began to weep and howl again because of the loss of their kindred and friends.

9 And it came to pass that thus did the three days pass away.”

We will leave it up to the reader to decide just how these two stories of two different Christ figures are reconciled. The Bible Christ arose and took up his body again with the wounds, and appeared to Mary and the disciples. There are those who call what happened a ‘resurrection’. It appears that all he did was to activate his mortal body and have it function without blood and with holes still in his feet, side and hands. How oxygen was carried to all parts of his body without blood may be a matter of faith rather than science. How he could walk with holes through his insteps without pain or limping must remain a mystery. How he would digest the food and drink he consumed during the 40 days in Palestine, is anyone’s guess. Acts 1:3.

The Mormons will tell us this was all necessary because the prophets, that only the Book of Mormon knows, spoke of this thing where thousands of dirty people had to put their fingers in all of God’s wounds so these ‘made up’ prophets wouldn’t be liars. This was at least a two week event at 8 hrs. a day.

Forty days would be a long time for those who were spared the horrific destructions directed by Christ in America, to learn what was in store for them. In 3Nephi 11:8 we finally hear how the terrorist Christ finally shows himself in South America: “8 And it came to pass, as they understood they cast their eyes up again towards heaven; and behold, they saw a Man descending out of heaven; and he was clothed in a white robe; and he came down and stood in the midst of them; and the eyes of the whole multitude were turned upon him, and they durst not open their mouths, even one to another, and wist not what it meant, for they thought it was an angel that had appeared unto them.

9 And it came to pass that he stretched forth his hand and spake unto the people, saying:

Again, Smith has to be more incredulous than the Bible. Smith has an angel of God telling Nephi 550 years before his birth that God had an ‘Only Begotten’ to send to earth (2Nephi 25:12) and his name would be Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (2Nephi 25:19) Not to make a liar out of the Bible and Paul when he tells us in Acts 11:26 “And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.” While Smith tells us it was 73 BC in South America that disciples were first called Christians. Alma 46:16 “all those who were true believers in Christ took upon them gladly the name of Christ, or Christians as they were called because of their belief in Christ who should come. “The Bible has one doubting Thomas, Smith has thousands! With the horrific destructions that the Nephite Jews endured, certainly Nephi or some prophet was arranging for an appropriate reception for the Son of God upon the South American continent. Of the millions of people, what would be a reasonable amount to gather for this event, 10,000? This was not any more just a great teacher in Palestine with 5,000 listeners, this was the Son of God destroying half of America and descending from the Heavens! Martin Luther King got bigger crowds in Washington, DC. Let us say at least 10,000 until the word got around.

3Nephi 11:15 “And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety and did bear record, that it was he, of whom it was written by the prophets, that should come.

We have no idea what Smith had in mind as to which ‘prophets’ prophesied that the Messiah would be crucified and be raised from the dead with those wounds. However, if there were 10,000 people and if they all went forth, one by one until they all had thrust their hands…etc. What a disgraceful thing that these people with no faith needed to do. If they tried to do it in a dignified manner, say they lined up 15 feet away from Jesus and walked up with reverence and respect, each one might take 30 seconds or 120 for every hour. So Christ would have to stand 83 hours or three and a half days of nonstop thrusting into his body! If the word got out after the first day, that crowd may have increased easily to 100,000! If we made it easier on the crowd and divided it into 8hour days, 5 days a week, we would have two weeks for the thrusting of the first ten thousand. It is of course possible that if this Christ wanted to multitask he could give the Sermon on the Mount and save a lot of time. We know that the Bible Christ used either Aramaic or Hebrew that he learned while in Palestine. How do you suppose he felt speaking reformed Egyptian that he hadn’t yet learned, to a bunch of wandering Jews?

Learn more…”Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” can be bought at Amazon.com

For those reading this blog with no prior understanding, we are talking about the ‘Book of Mormon’ which claims to be a compilation of many books with different titles within that 500 plus page book, i.e. Book of Mosiah, book of 1 Nephi, 2 Nephi, 3 Nephi, Alma, etc, etc. The main story line claims to be about the Jewish ancestors of the Amerindian living on the North and South American continents contained within these books, who migrated from Jerusalem to Chile, South America about 600 BC. The book of Ether became the insertion by Smith of a history of what in Smith’s day was referred to as the ‘Mound Builders’ who preceded the Native American Indian civilizations including the Mayan, Aztec, Olmec and Inca civilizations. This ‘history’ is what Mitt Romney’s faith is based on and considers ‘scripture’ more correct than the Bible, he is currently a High Priest of that faith.

Smith and Cowdery, in their early twenties were not dumb and had fanciful storytelling abilities. It is not clear what Smith originally had in mind when he first thought up the possibility of two or three stories of two or three different groups of people back in the book of Mosiah. There was the second sketchy account of a voyage of Jews from Jerusalem with an unknown (made up) son of Jerusalem’s King Zedekiah (that Smith called Mulek), who also sailed from Palestine to South America and lived apart from the Nephites in the area of present day Columbia and grew, unbeknownst to the Nephites, into a great nation…but that is a different discussion.

Back to the Mound Builders, Smith brings up the discovery of this ‘Mound Builder’ civilization in the form of 24 gold plates in chapter 8 of Mosiah written in this unknown ‘Adamic’ tongue. At one point Smith was going to have Mormon translate this record and presumably include it in the book of Mosiah. Smith decides to have king Mosiah become a Seer and translator and has him translate this unknown (Adamic tongue) into reformed Egyptian at about 92 BC with seer stones just like Smith claimed to do over 2000 years later. (Mosiah 28:11) Whether Smith forgot this ‘Jaredite’ record was already translated by a Seer Mosiah or not, he had Moroni, who was not identified as a Seer and without the seer stones, translate these 24 gold plates again in his book of Ether with copious personal remarks, the origins if which we find in the King James New Testament.

It is remarkable that Smith, at his age, did as well as he did keeping the story, with all these records covering over 3,000 years in at least three unrelated languages, as believable as he did. It is just that the mind of the average person gets tired of following it all. The only thing consistent about the ‘writers’, is that someone needed to know the whole convoluted story, and that someone was Smith. But, with the loss of the book of Lehi by Smith’s first scribe containing the first 475 years, it presented real logistical problems for Smith and required all of his creative thinking to address this dilemma. (maybe with some help from Cowdery)

(As President, I wonder how many returned Mormon Missionaries Mitt will have as part of his government? As a Mormon, he believes in the ‘last days’ the American Constitution will be saved by the Mormon Priesthood.)

Smith fails to create a credible scenario for the winding up scene. He does have a couple of ‘flash backs’ in his final chapters of the book of Moroni when he realized he had established no Father/Son relationship between Mormon and his newly found son Moroni, discovered in 385 AD. The story by Moroni saying his father was slain in battle is patently false. (Mormon 8:5) This chapter 8 of his father’s small book is written 15 years after Mormon’s description of the last battle in chapter 7, where only he and his son and 22 others survived. Smith has Mormon say in Mormon 6:6 that Mormon had hid up all the records except the few plates that he was going to give his son, Moroni, before the last big battle. This is where the story, logistically, bogs down. Mormon could conceivably have made a record of the things he had observed on a few plates as he was commanded to do in Mormon 1:4 and might have wanted to hand those few plates to his son before the battle, but the abridgment of the whole Nephite record, supposedly done by Mormon, required Mormon to have all the tons of records at his disposal with plenty of time to study, in order to find the 1% that Mormon felt was worthy to include in his abridgment.

The only time and way this could possibly happen would be if there had been an Aladdin like cave in the Hill Cumorah that opened and closed based on Faith. (both Smith and Cowdery described one with an ever burning light that contained tons of records that even Brigham Young characterized as being many wagon loads of records, here Mormon would feel safe from his hated enemy the Lamanites, to peruse and find time and a place to mine ore in order to make dozens of fresh gold plates to engrave his abridgment on. The wicked Lamanites, without faith, could never find or open the cave to get the gold! (Naturally, the Mormon God had to move these sacred records back to hill Shim in So. America to keep Smith’s followers faith strong.)

The purported abridgment by Mormon of the tons of Nephite record plates could only have happened after the big battle where Mormon himself hid in this Aladdin cave with all the records. His son and the 23 others deserted him until Smith had Moroni return 15 years later to find the completed abridgment his father had made during those 15 years. (In a true story, old Mormon could have used his son’s help in mining for ore and procuring food while his father studied and abridged the tons of records) But Smith has Moroni following the savage Lamanites while they massacred the remaining white Jews over thousands of miles back to Columbia. When he returned again to Palmyra, New York he of course had to find the 24 gold plate Jaredite record as well when Smith wanted it translated again, instead of using the Mosiah version. He could have looked among the plates for Mosiah’s translation, but since Smith at that point, was going to turn Moroni into an angel, Smith thought making him a Seer first while still in this life was a good twist. It just made God look very impractical and not cost effective. Where the two seer stones ended up in that large pile of gold, the reader will never know or care. (An angel brought these magic stones to Smith and we presume an angel dropped them off on King Mosiah’s balcony when he did the first translation as described in Mosiah 28:12. The description is the same as Smith said he used until he found that his ‘peep’ stone in his hat was more convenient.) Again, this is all stuff that Mitt Romney considers the word of his God! Or terrorist Christ!

Smith thought the insertion of the small book, ‘Words of Mormon’ into the record right after the replacement record and before the book of Mosiah would clarify and not make him or his God look like they were inept. Unfortunately, the dating is wrong and Mormon could not possibly have made the abridgment of the book of Lehi down to the reign of king Benjamin before the big battle! He goes on to say, at this point, that he, Mormon was still perusing the records and lo and behold he just magically lays his hands on what will be Smith’s ‘replacement record’ (hurray, hurray!) that ‘All Seeing’ God had Nephi start about 950 years earlier, but was never mentioned by any of the record keepers after it was finished, even though Amaleki was to deliver it to king Benjamin, the official keeper of the records. (WOM vs. 9) Smith forgot to modify his already completed drafts of the book of Mosiah to cover this important change of events and the new character, Amaleki, the last prophet and writer of the replacement story, who Smith let live to be about 300. (Smith needed about 8-10 more father-to-son writers in his replacement record to keep age and dating more in line. The same problem occurs again with Smith in the book called 4 Nephi.)

Smith/God wasn’t thinking clearly when he had Moroni return to hill Cumorah 15 years after the last battle and say that his father had been slain in battle, and then insert the WOM indicating Mormon was in the big cave with all the records waiting for his son while in the middle of his abridgment. Mormon certainly had a long wait for his son. (15 years to 400 AD!)

Find more in “Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” Book of Mormon at Amazon.com

]]>https://claudeheater.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/book-of-mormon-dating-errors-continued/feed/1claudeheaterHow ignorant did Smith think his readers would be?https://claudeheater.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/how-ignorant-did-smith-think-his-readers-would-be/
https://claudeheater.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/how-ignorant-did-smith-think-his-readers-would-be/#respondWed, 07 Sep 2011 23:32:51 +0000http://claudeheater.wordpress.com/?p=20Probably the most glaring error of Smith’s fantasy (Book of Mormon/The Most Correct Book on Earth) is in his hysterical (historical) dating. Joseph Smith trusted his first scribe, Martin Harris with his first hand written draft of the first 475 years of his thousand years of Nephite (Jewish?) history (Fantasy) in South America. This draft was stolen by Martin’s wife and never recovered. Smith had a warning from his God that the thieves were waiting for Smith to publish a re-translation of those 475 years. God told Smith that with the magic peep stone he could give a word-for-word retranslation but the thieves would somehow alter his handwritten manuscript without a trace and this would show glaring inconsistencies proving him a false prophet. These 475 years of history were part of what Smith called the Book of Lehi. Lehi was the supposed leader of a group of Jews who God led from Jerusalem to So. America in 600 BC. Nephi says they departed during the reign of Zedekiah who didn’t take the throne until a few years later. This was Smith’s first major error. (1Nephi 1:4)

Smith couldn’t give a word-for-word retranslation because of his many ad-libs so he decided that he would have Lehi’s son Nephi write a similar history of the same period for as long as he lived with Nephi’s perspective of the same events and then have this new record handed down, not through Nephi’s bloodline, but through his brother’s bloodline until he got to the timeline in the story that Smith had retained with his notes.

It is a tangled web we weave when we first attempt to deceive. Smith had a nimble. creative mind and like a lot of con artists are good until their spoken word is written down and checked for inconsistencies. The Book of Mormon is a long tedious book with many twists and turns. One is never sure of who kept the records (assuming it was true) or where and how it got to the next writer to be an actual history.

Needless to say, Harris was finished as scribe. Smith was lucky for most of his short life and it just so happened that a school teacher named Oliver Cowdery who had been boarding at Smith’s parents house, and whose father, along with Smith’s, were Rods-men together before Joseph’s father left Vermont, and was eager and willing to act as scribe and eventually as second Elder to Smith in a new Church.

(Rod’s Men were people who were paid to look for minerals or water in the ground with a witch hazel stick. Smith earned money looking for gold and silver for years with his peep stone in his hat, he used this same process, according to his wife, to ‘translate’ the Book of Mormon.) Together Smith and Cowdery, created out of thin air the first 7 books of the current Book of Mormon to replace the stolen book of Lehi. Smith got ‘revelations’ telling Cowdery that he had special gifts of the Witch Hazel stick (Divining Rod) where he would get answers from God, and also have a gift to translate other ancient records that would come later. (See original Book of Commandments corresponding to Doctrine & Covenants Sec 8)

Somehow, they had a timetable that pushed them to finish the final ‘translation’ and rushed the replacement record with a lot of quotes from the King James version of Isaiah that was supposedly written in Egyptian on plates of brass representing the Jewish Tanakh but stupidly, in Egyptian. Smith has ‘so called’ prophet/writers live two or three times longer in this replacement record than Nephi or King Mosiah to write two or three verses saying virtually nothing, but getting Smith past the 475 year timeframe. It was about May of 1929 when Smith and Cowdery got the revelation to start what is the present version of the Book of Mormon with the copyright applied for in June of that year including a description of the Jaredite history that comes at the end of the book. Obviously, Smith knew from his completed drafts before Cowdery arrived, exactly what he intended to include in his book as story line. Smith embellished and invented characters as he went along. Smith’s family told of how Joseph, as a boy, would keep his family entertained inventing Indian stories so convincingly that one thought he had lived among them.

The loss of the Book of Lehi made it necessary for Smith to re-think the ending of his Nephite ‘history’ and make up a very implausible situation that doesn’t pass the ‘smell test’ in the short ‘book’ called ‘The Words of Mormon’ dated 385 AD. He needed to have Mormon, during his abridgment, find the record that Smith and Cowdery were creating to cover the 470 years of lost manuscript and needed for it to be in the cave where Mormon could find it and insert it as part of his abridgment that would follow his ‘book of Lehi’ record that Smith had purportedly already translated. Smith needed to have Mormon, who had no schooling, be literate in both Hebrew and Egyptian, along with his son Moroni who spoke and wrote both Hebrew and Egyptian, and also managed to even translate a record written by people living about 2300 BC and who spoke and wrote in a dialect that Adam learned from God in the Garden of Eden! To think Moroni just pops up in Mormon’s record about 485 BC, literate in two major languages (Hebrew and Egyptian) is astounding, and now Smith will have him translate a record that would be a preview of everything that was to happen on earth, written as a vision in 2300 BC from Mesopotamia (Arctic Circle?) where history tells us cuneiform was used on clay tablets. But the brother of Jared was to write in still another unknown tongue all of the vision he was shown. (Ether 3:24-28) Wow! (Ether chapter 3:25 “And when the Lord had said these words, he showed unto the brother of Jared all the inhabitants of the earth which had been, and also all that would be; and he withheld them not from his sight, even unto the ends of the earth.”) The brother of Jared was then commanded to write this whole vision in an unknown tongue and seal it up with two stones and it would come forth at a later date. Smith tells us two thirds of the plates that he received were ‘sealed’ and said further that this vision written over 5,000 years earlier was now in his possession awaiting God’s wishes. Awesome! The part of the vision describing the Bubonic Plague on the people along with the Inquisition was especially gruesome! But there was nothing that God could do about it because it was all predestined and in the script he had been using for countless worlds that he has created! Mormonism!

Smith had to have Mormon bring tons of gold records at least 5,000 miles from South America to Palmyra, New York in order for Mormon to find ‘extra plates’. Smith has Mormon say in verse 3 of ‘Words of Mormon’ the following:”for after I had made an abridgment from the plates of Nephi, down to the reign of this king Benjamin, of whom Amaleki spake, I searched among the records which had been delivered into my hands, and I found these plates, which contained this small account of the prophets, from Jacob down to the reign of this king Benjamin, and also many of the words of Nephi. .” This is what Smith used as a replacement record for the lost Book of Lehi. (Which meant that God, Mormon and Nephi knew in 600 BC, would be stolen 2400 years later.) This ‘tangled web’ is getting too tangled and Smith and Cowdery are pushing too hard to get the book published so Smith is compounding his mistakes or ambiguities.

The problem is that Smith dictated as quoted above that Mormon had ‘abridged’ and extracted his 1% from the records supposedly in his hands that he refers to in this quote as a record from the ‘plates of Nephi’ down to the reign of king Benjamin. In the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon as part of the preface he tells us that what what was lost was Mormon’s abridgment of the book of Lehi from the ‘plates of Lehi’. “I would inform you that I translated, by the gift and power of God, and caused to be written, one hundred and sixteen pages, the which I took from the Book of Lehi, which was an accountabridged from the plates of Lehi, by the hand of Mormon;”

In Smith’s original version Mormon’s last words were to be chapter 7 in his book ending with ‘Amen’. However, in this version Mormon had no time to condense tons of records into a stack of plates that Moroni could carry into battle and with him following the Lamanites around for the next 15 years where somewhere his father was slain in battle as he tells us in Mormon 8:5. In Mormon 6:6 we are told he gave his son a ‘few plates’, but certainly not the rest of chapter 6 or 7. In Mormon’s life book, there is no command to write anything other than what he observed during his lifetime. He tells us in chapter 6 that he should hide the tons of records so the Lamanites would not find and destroy them, but says nothing about abridging them, only to prepare for and fight the last losing battle. It would be conceivable for him to give the first 5 chapters of his book to his son Moroni.

Smith’s head must be spinning trying to make his implausible story more plausible. We have Mormon at age 70+ sitting in a brightly lit cave in Palmyra, NY, trying to be as credible as Smith will allow him to be. According to the 1830 edition, Mormon would be abridging the whole Nephite history starting with the book of Lehi, leaving out 99% of what the prophets wrote including the words of Jesus that Jesus spoke to the Nephites. (3Nephi 26:6 “And now there cannot be written in this book even a hundredth part of the things which Jesus did truly teach unto the people; (WOM 5; 3Nephi 5:8; Helaman 3:14) Just as Smith has Nephi write his version of the book of his Father, years after the purported events. Smith had Mormon and Moroni do the same thing because in Smith’s mind, it was more credible that way. But if God was in charge of any of this, it makes him look stupid or inept at best. Why bring tons of sacred records 5,000 miles from Hill Shim to Hill Cumorah if there wasn’t going to be an abridgment?When and where would Mormon have the time to peruse thousands of plates, find ore and make an abridgment that he doesn’t say anything about in his book of his observations of his life? This effort would take multiple years of not being disturbed in a safe place where he could mine for ore. There are writers who can make fiction sound like non-fiction, but Smith is not one of them.

Smith becomes ever less credible as a ‘story teller’ and writes stuff that makes God/Christ either stupid, liars or grossly uninformed. Christ told 3Nephi that he would join Jesus in heaven when he reached the age of 72. Smith has him live to be about double that age or longer. He has the last writer of the ‘original’ records, Ammaron, that ended in 320 AD, live to be over 300 years before he buried tons of gold records all by himself without horses hundreds of miles distant from where he had been keeping them. General Mormon would then find them deep in his enemy’s territory with Mormon needing to transport tons of gold plates 500+ miles through enemy lines a total of 5,000 plus miles to New York while being pursued by an overwhelming Lamanite army bent on recovering the gold and destroying Mormon and the complete Nephite/Jewish race!

The Book of Enos 521-421 BC:

Enos is the son of Jacob, the brother of Nephi, (whose family couldn’t read or write and wanted nothing to do with being historians) he turned the record over to his son Jarom in 420BC having kept the record for 104 years and writing 27 verses. This would be one verse every four years! Jarom starts in 420BC, and writes until 361BC a total of 15 verses in 59 years; similar to the ratio of his father, a verse every 4 years. Omni takes over in 361BC and writes until 317BC, a total of 44 years, with 3 verses; one verse every 14 years! We then have Amaron who writes at least until 279BC, a full 38 years with a total of 6 verses giving us a verse almost every 7 years.

We then have two writers writing 3 verses along with the last writer for a total of 149 years and a total of 21 verses, giving us a strong feeling that these ‘prophets’ must have been doing something besides writing. For 400 years none of these writers were coordinating their writing or dating with the Nephite Kings, who were supposed to be the principal historical writers for the Nephites. With this last prolific group we have again one verse every 7 years with the last writer writing 90% of the verses.

To achieve this amount of creative writing God/Smith had these ‘prophets’ live in the 200 plus year range. Can the reader imagine how much we would have if Mormon edited out his usual 99 percent? Can we assume that the lost book of Lehi contains the 400 year King’s history that God doesn’t feel is important anymore? It is strange that Nephi, the most prolific of all of ‘small record’ writers with dozens of pages dies at the age of about 70, while Mosiah, the most righteous king and prolific writer, God has him die at 63. Why then the unrealistic ages for ‘Prophets’ who don’t write? Were the lives of God’s chosen people so shallow at that time that God felt one verse every 4 yrs. was ample? Below is the table with a clear perspective.

As an illustration of what God has to do to make this all work is to take Omni, for whom the book of Omni was named, and if the cycle of birth is maintained in an average fashion, God needed to keep Omni alive until the age of 207 just to write 3 verses of little consequence! Above, in the book of Enos, is a reasonable ‘replenish the earth’ table for the writers from Nephi until the end of the replacement record. We see our God of miracles kept *Chemish alive 221 years to write ONE verse! His son has a few more years of longevity and writes a total of TWO verses!

To illustrate the grave dating problems of the replacement record: These family members are keeping the record with dating that prophesies the coming of Christ in 600 years. The lunar-solar calendar of the Israelites requires the insertion of an extra month every three years. In the space of 100 years it will make the dating short by three years if it is not added in. Since Smith was unaware of this, his characters were as well. The ages of these writers are 2 to 5 times the age of anyone else. If they add multiple years to their own life span, how can we rely on their dating of anything else? Omni is 163 years old when he receives the record in 361BC. He writes two verses and says it is 317BC reflecting 44 years that he has counted in those 3 verses making him 207 years old. He gives the record to his 182 year old son Amaron who waits another 38 years, writes one verse and says it is now 279BC, and him now, 220 yrs. old. For the next 155 years there is no fixed dating until Mosiah 6:4; this gives a date of 124BC and is relied upon for the rest of the BOM. If they didn’t add the extra month every 3 years it would be 111BC for the Nephites and 18 years short for the birth of Christ! CAN THIS BE ANYTHING OTHER THAN JS RUSHING THRU TIME TO GET TO THE KING BENJAMIN SPOT WHERE HIS DRAFTS CONTINUED? I would rather believe there is no God than believe in this inept exalted Man as God, that JS portrays.

If Smith had a more accurate time frame for his book of Lehi that was lost, we will never know. But we can be sure that the book of Lehi, covering the same time frame, would be less than half the pages of the replacement record! We also know that in 3Nephi Smith extends the life spans again because he again doesn’t have enough father-to-son ‘passing of the plates’. According to the promises of Christ recorded in 3Nephi, this third Nephi (the son of Nephi) and also one of Christ’s 12 disciples chosen in America, was supposed to die and go to heaven at the age of 72. He was given the records by his father, who departed to parts unknown in 1 AD. We presume Nephi was at least 20 at the time he spoke with the spirit of Christ, the day before Christ is born in Bethlehem, unless the Nephite calendar is way off, and Christ was already a young lad. (If you pay attention, logic will tell you if Christ can speak to Man from heaven the day before he is born into the world, the fetus is growing without the heavenly spirit inside. So if anything happens to the fetus in the womb the ‘spirit’ for that child is saved for the next in line to give birth here on earth.) If Nephi was 20 in 1 AD he would be about 55 when chosen as a disciple and is promised his resurrection by Christ at age 72. Yet, in 4Nephi, vs 10, we find 110 years has passed either from the birth of Christ making 3Nephi at least 130 yrs old or 110 years has passed from the appearance of Christ to the Nephites making 3Nephi considerably older and either way, Christ’s promise is null and void.

3Nephi passes the record to his son Amos who could easily be over 100 at that time. Vs 21 tells us that 194 years has passed from the coming of Christ (still ambiguous) but tells us that Amos is 84 years older or about 184 years old and has died. He has passed the record on to his 150 year old son Amos2 with the 194 year time frame. Mormon, who abridged the record, if not JSmith, writes several verses telling the same type of story with passages of time dates until the death of Amos2.

This occurs in vs 47 where he dies with 305 years having passed away making him about 265. He manages to hand over tons of records to his 260 year old brother Ammaron. Ammaron keeps the tons of buried records in their villa opposite the magnificent temple where Christ gave his second Sermon on the Mount repeating almost letter perfect Matthew’s version of what he said. Waiting 20 years until he was 285 he decided he needed to bury the tons of records in an even safer place that no one had ever heard of in a small obscure hill that he or Smith will soon call Shim. He only needed, at age 285, to take tons of records three or four hundred miles and do so without horses and bury them in a manner that Mormon could easily find the ‘plates of Nephi’ located in those tons of records.

In a true story, during the days of young Mormon where Robbers had been in charge for years, and according to 4Nephi vs. 45, “three hundred years had passed away, both the people of Nephi and the Lamanites had become exceeding wicked one like unto the other”. (This was 10 years before Mormon was born.) Mormon would be totally dependent on the dating of these records, if we were talking about an actual history. We just have to ask: Who was teaching anyone to read and write both Hebrew and Egyptian and from what written record? Smith’s story gets murky again as to locations. We can be reasonably certain that with Christ’s burning of Zarahemla, the action of Christ’s visit was at the temple in Bountiful. We know that Zarahemla was rebuilt but we hear nothing of the records returning to Zarahemla where they had been kept for generations until Christ’s fire destroyed the city. It would not be practical to have Hill Shim in that area. It would appear that Ammaron met Nephi where Ammaron lived near the temple at Bountiful and then we are told in Mormon 1:6 that his father took him to the land of Zarahemla when he was 11 yrs. old.

He was 10 years late in following his orders to retrieve the plates of Nephi (possibly because no one had ever heard of a hill called Shim) and with all of the wars and battles, he wouldn’t get around to reading anything, providing he was one of those rare individuals who was home schooled and became literate when there was nothing to read. We hear nothing of his mother and he is separated from his father when he was between 10-14. He was preaching on the street corner at 15 and at 16 led a band of guerilla Nephite fighters for most of his life. Where he learned to read and write Hebrew and Egyptian to teach his son Moroni whom he never mentions until he is 75, we will never know. One would think while abridging the Book of Alma where from chapter 43 until the end of the book he records the name of the commander of the Nephite armies a total of 190 times he would mention that it is also the name of his son with only two in the record who have the name of Moroni! This covers a period of about 25 years.

Mormon then starts his abridgment of the next book called Helaman that mentions the city of Moroni or Moronihah that were named after General Moroni which comes another 16 times over the next 80 years with never a reference to the fact that Mormon has an only son with the same name! The reason for this is plain and simple, Smith is a story teller and he didn’t think of a son by that name for Mormon until after the great last battle where only 24 Nephites were left, one of which was a son named Moroni (Mormon 6:6) and was to be the next protagonist in Smith’s Nephite saga.

]]>https://claudeheater.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/how-ignorant-did-smith-think-his-readers-would-be/feed/0claudeheaterTableGood Times?https://claudeheater.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/good-times/
https://claudeheater.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/good-times/#respondWed, 07 Sep 2011 23:32:39 +0000http://claudeheater.wordpress.com/?p=16Excerpts from “Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth”, Joseph said this of his Book of Mormon. Can buy at Amazon.com. The scene takes place in Saudi Arabia in the most uninhabitable desert in the world with 250,000 sq. mi. of nothing but sand dunes.

With the Mormon God’s command through his Ouija ball, it brought Nephi to the middle of this great desert getting to Bountiful. (Oman) Further north in southern Algeria, ground temperatures have been measured as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit!

If you could choose, as God’s ‘chosen’, would you prefer to bear and raise your children in 250,000 square miles of sand dunes for their first 10 years of life, or would you prefer to be sealed in a cigar shaped vessel being tossed right side up or down by mountain waves in a constantly gyrating container for 344 days? (Book of Mormon )

Leaving the Jews that Smith brought to South America from present day Oman on the Arabian Peninsula in 590 BC and go back in time to the people who came out of Noah’s Ark. Smith has them leaving Iraq after having lived in Babylon for a few generation, traveling by foot with all their possessions including elephants, bison, horses, goats, cattle, etc, etc for the Arctic Circle where they then built 8 barges that were submersible, and voyaged for 344 days to America sometimes on top of the water and sometimes in the middle of the ocean with mountain waves crashing on them. They had no control over when God might submerse the vessels so the small hatch for air was pretty much sealed tight. Since there were no sails and prophets have described these as cigar shaped vessels, it would be like pushing heavily laden logs across the Atlantic Ocean at a very bumpy snail’s pace.

One must keep in mind, since all of the animals that survived Noah’s flood were ALL now in Mesopotamia; Joseph Smith’s God needed to bring, along with his chosen people, horses, bison, elephants, oxen, grizzlies, wolves, anacondas, coyote, etc, etc.

All of the birds and animals indigenous to North and South America entered these 8 airless containers; not once, but twice! The first time, both animals and humans were sealed in an air tight container designed by Smith’s God, himself, for their 700 mile journey, being pushed like logs with wind guided by this same God at one mile an hour to the northern shore of the Caspian Sea. Joseph Smith’s God did not became aware of his fatal ship designing mistake when his angels opened the barge doors 2 months later and found everyone dead. No, not then!

Remember, the Mormon God is only a resurrected Man who may have been just a simple farmer who was born, lived and died on his 60 acre farm when he lived on another ‘Earth’. So this exalted Man, still learning on the job, promptly revived both mortal man and beast, including of course, the honey bees and the Grizzly bears. The fairy tale continues with them led by ‘God’ in a cloud with them on foot to the Barents Sea at the Arctic Circle. (Ether 2:6)

Rub al Khali, Saudi Arabia Lehi Land

There, this bi-polar Mormon God tested them by forcing both man and beast to live 4 years in their tents in sub freezing temperatures without further instructions from God as to what God expected them to do. Could this be the spot God had chosen, ‘where no man had been’? He gave them hope in Ether 1:42 when God said he would go before them to this promised land.

Now for 4 years in this bitter cold they have heard nothing from their God! Why? Because young Mormon Gods must increase their kingdoms and glory by having as many wives as possible in order to produce and control as many spiritual children as possible in other ‘worlds’ for Eternity! Interestingly enough, this one exalted Man (the Mormon God) has already made worlds without number, following this exact same script, making bodies of flesh with ‘evil therein’ so the Devil has plenty of company in the huge realm that he controls knowing he is a vital link in God’s PLAN. (See Book of Mormon 2Nephi 2:29 and Pearl of Great Price, Moses 1:33 ‘And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten. This contradicts Mormon doctrine that their exalted Man/God had many sons, including Lucifer. Only Begotten refers to ‘in the flesh’ which wouldn’t happen for centuries!

In vs. 13 we are told they arrived, going northward, to another seashore, that they named ‘Moriancumer’ after Mahonri Moriancumer, the brother of Jared, the great Prophet, who in 4 years would be shown hours of heavenly Videos of the Predestined Earth as it was planned by this exalted Farmer, scene by scene, from the beginning to the end. All of this vision Mahonri was to write on frozen clay tablets in confounded cuneiform language and bring it all to this ‘Promised Land’! So, between overseeing the building of these 8 new barges at the North Pole, he now had to find time in his freezing tent, after finding a suitable clay pit there at the Pole, and proceed to write the thousands of words that Joseph Smith was about to translate until his Mormon God… changed his mind.

God could show these videos because exalted Man/God had videoed his ‘worlds without number have I created’ (Moses 1:33 Pearl of Great Price) following the exact same script. Smith’s Book of Mormon tells us at least 3 times as in 1 Nephi 10:19 ‘…the course of the Lord is one eternal round’.

Mahonri had no idea of this when he arrived after a week of freezing temperatures, he expected his God in the cloud would give him a clue as to what to do with man and beast. Four years passed with multiple freezing deaths of both man and beast. None of the honey bees survived and the Oxetpecs, Ephankas, Orphanas and the Lomcure’s became extinct! (the problem could be as simple as ‘writer’s block’ for Joseph Smith.)

In Ether 2:14 we are told the Lord finally returned and instead of apologizing to Mahonri for God’s negligence, He proceeded to chastise Mahonri for not getting in touch. We are finally told that the Lord would forgive them for all their sins especially the sin of wanting to return to the warm fertile Euphrates valley after they were abandoned for 4 years by God in the Arctic Circle! But not to worry, the worst is still yet to come! But first in vs 16 ship designer God, instructs them to build again the same identical barges that they built for the Caspian Sea, (without light or air) to cross from the Polar Arctic area to western South America, continually being rolled like logs for the whole 10,000 plus miles!

God knew instinctively that the one mile an hour speed of the 700 mile Caspian Sea would not do for the 10,000 mile Atlantic journey, so he would have to create fierce winds with mountain waves. (Having never been on the ocean when he was a man on His earth, he didn’t know that this would produce violent seasickness.) Anyway, when they got to the Barents Sea and were instructed by God to build again the same identical barges (Smith was familiar with barges from the Erie Canal near his home in Palmyra, N.Y) that these stupid people, (not knowing they died in the first set of barges) started again building the same identical barges; the first, the second and not until they were all completed again, lying on the Barents seashore on blocks of ice, did this young prophet realize that God’s design was a disaster waiting to happen! In vs. 18 we find the barges all lined up on the shore of the Barents Sea on top of 10 ft thick slabs of ice; then, lo and behold, Mahonri makes an amazing discovery! The Mormon God knows nothing about ship building!

Ah, the mysteries of God! Lo and behold, is it not written in the sacred book of Mahonri’s vision, (that Smith was forbidden to translate) was it not at this point when God forgave Moriancumer, (the brother of Jared) that his mind was enlightened and he reminded this exalted Man that his earthly creation still needs air to breathe and that they needed to be able to see inside the barges for all kinds of activities for such a long journey? They needed some way to dump waste material of humans as well as animals. They needed a lot of water and provisions for themselves and the animals, especially the larger elephants, the humongous cureloms and cumoms, bison, oxen, cows, horses, wolves and of course, grizzlies were problematic. Unfortunately, the Mormon God continued to follow his script in heaven, while realities on earth were quite different!

Here a great mystery is revealed that explains, when, why and where Moriancumer moved Mount Zerin. Mt. Zerin, (Book of Mormon Ether 12:30) was of course the mountain at the southern tip of the 700 mile long Caspian Sea where God got the cedars for the cedars of Lebanon that Solomon used in building his Great Temple. These cedars first grew, after the flood, on Mt. Zerin, near Mount Ararat where the great grandfather of Mahonri, Ham, landed with his father, Noah, in the Ark. Yes, it was this very Mount Zerin where all the wood came from for the first set of barges and where all the tools were left, thinking they had done their job.

And it came to pass that God told Moriancumer that all he needed to do, if he had the faith of that proverbial grain of ‘mustard seed’, is to command that same Mount Zerin to remove itself from the Caucasus Mountain Range and appear in the Arctic, near Santa’s Workshop, now! So the identical barges (Ether 2:16) were built again and Santa could have wood for all the sleighs and toys he needed. It was all so simple!

The devil is in the details and he certainly was there during the building of both sets of 8 barges. In verse 18, Moriancumer tells us he has built the last of the 8 barges exactly like the first set precisely the way God designed and directed, i.e. without the possibility of light or air! Mahonri now perceives this as a problem! But in Fairy Tale stories, there is no problem that isn’t solvable. Rather than using logic and figuring it out by himself he felt he should run it by the vessel’s designer, the Mormon God!

Ether 2:20 gives the farmer-exalted Man’s response. ‘Behold, thou shalt make a hole in the top, and also in the bottom; and when thou shalt suffer for air thou shalt unstop the hole and receive air.’ Yea, sure! God is going to get his heavenly fan and blow directly into the hole blowing out all of the stale air replacing it with fresh. He instantly assigns an angel to this job for the whole voyage.

Since the Mormon God had already conceived of them being submerged like a submarine he continued: ‘And if it be so that the water come in upon thee, thou shalt…close the damn hole as quickly as you can! (The hole in the bottom was for the times the barge turned upside down with the mountain waves, but the same procedure needed to be followed like with the hole on top. CLOSE IT AS FAST AS YOU CAN! ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU ARE LIKE A WHALE IN THE DEPTHS OF THE OCEAN. (Book of Mormon, Ether 2:24 ‘I will bring you up again out of the depths of the sea.’ All 8 barges of you and yours! Just keep the alligators chained down and away from the sheep!

There you go, notwithstanding them being 500 or a 1,000 feet in the depths of the Ocean there was still no pressure on these holes or stoppers or on the bodies of the occupants. When the vessel flipped upside down how did the elephants and bison avoid landing right on top of the hole stopper and break it? At least the ladder to get there! Did it open out or in? How could it ever be water tight! We never hear that Mahonri did as did Noah when he put pitch on the Ark both inside and out. If you’ve ever tried to push an inflated beach ball under water you see just how far you can get. But then, what do farmers know about a ‘tight like a dish’ wooden vessel filled with air and its ability to submerge itself even a few feet and come to the surface again.

You really have to hold back a laugh when Mahonri only wants lights in a completely closed vessel so he can see to ‘steer’ not to pee. Vs. 19… More about all this nonsense in ‘Fatal Flaws’ volume III…”Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” (Book of Mormon) is at Amazon.com

Joseph Smith lived his whole life in the North East of the USA never having ever seen a sand dune desert. He undoubtedly had access to a world map showing the location of the Middle East including Saudi Arabia. He identified the Red Sea and felt safe when his Ouija Ball gave Nephi directions; Smith would know it was a south-southeast direction. (1Nephi 16:13) Smith just didn’t realize that Nephi had no way of determining this type of direction because that kind of compass wasn’t invented yet!

Joseph Smith would see on his map the Sinai Desert and realize that this was the desert/wilderness area the Israelites wandered in for 40 years where the Bible says the Jewish God preserved them with manna and quail with water springing forth out of rocks on Moses’ command. What Smith didn’t know was that it was just a ‘wilderness’ with little, if any, ‘sand dunes’. However, when he determined that his destination for his hapless group would be ‘Bountiful’ on the south-east tip of Arabia and gave the command to turn eastward so the group wouldn’t end up in Sheba/Yemen; he didn’t know he was pointing them directly into the most feared desert of 250,000 square miles of nothing but sand dunes! Some of which were 800 feet high. The Bedouin call this area Rub al Khali or in English ‘Empty Quarter’. Empty quarter because both man and beast avoided it until the 20th century when oil was found.

The Empty Quarter is 583,000 square kilometers in size with no oasis or water holes!

Anyone who has studied both the Bible and Book of Mormon can see Smith’s efforts to portray similar images to a Bible believing world. According to the Bible, God’s ‘chosen’ wandered in the ‘wilderness’ for years; so why not Nephi’s group? Well, the Jewish God had a reason for this delay getting his chosen to the ‘promised land’ and at least kept his chosen healthy by providing on a daily basis manna, quail and water! And for those Bible scholars, Exodus 13:31 tells us they took their cattle and flocks with them for sacrifice and sustenance. Obviously, where they were headed was not an ‘empty quarter’ but a wilderness where animals could graze and find water.

The only way for Nephi to get to Bountiful would be by following the Red Sea, Frankincense Trail and there would be tribes of people where the capital of Yemen is and the capital of Oman. It is just like with Mormon on his way to Cumorah, he would have met all kinds of Amerindians all along the way. Sorry, apologists!

But, in Joseph Smith’s childish fantasy, the Mormon God’s ‘chosen’ are sent for years into a world of sand dunes where no animal with any instincts at all, would spend more than 2 days! There is simply no way to sustain life unless you have prepared for the journey with female camels to provide the only liquid the Bedouin will see and staked down sandstorm proof Bedouin tents (with a male camel to cary it) until he leaves this empty quarter within a few days! He better have bags of rice and dates and use the dung of the camel to boil the camel milk and to cook the rice. What would two families who lived in big walled Jerusalem all of their lives know about any of this?

Within Saudi Arabia, winds average 3.2 to 4.8 kilometers per hour (kph) and can reach 112 to 128 kph in early afternoon. Expect major sandstorms and dust storms at least once a week.

The greatest danger is getting lost in a swirling wall of sand. Wear goggles if you live in the 20th Century and cover your mouth and nose with cloth. If natural shelter is unavailable, mark your direction of travel, lie down, and sit out the storm. The temperature of the sand can easily reach 160 degrees on a hot summer day so one must seek shelter. However the temperature at night can drop to 40 degrees. One is inclined to want to get to one’s destination quickly.

Since Smith had never been to a desert area he could not describe a make-believe event in a desert area. There is never a mention of these weekly sand storms. There is never a prayer to God to get them out of this hell hole! Can you imagine Nephi looking for food or an animal to shoot with his stick in the above photo? Can you imagine what kind of health these unfortunate humans might have after a 10 year diet of only uncooked, bloody scavenger meat from a stray Hyena or Jackal, all forbidden by the Law of Moses?

Smith says nothing in his 500 plus pages of his fantasy about drinking water or camels! Smith does say in Book of Mormon, 1Nephi 16 that the Ouija Ball kept them near the borders of the Red Sea (Nephi would have no way of knowing what this body of water was called at the time. If Smith had his ‘fantasy people’ stop at the Port of Ezion-Geber, he might have found out what the sea was then called) and that the Ball led them to the ‘more fertile’ areas. Logistically, this could happen, but this was a known Bedouin travel path to Sheba and they would have to encounter Bedouin tribes at those fertile spots and barter for water, dates and sheep. (Smith’s designated ‘Bountiful’ where they spent a couple of years was the main Oasis on the famous Frankincense Trail and would have a Bedouin Tribe cultivating it and living there! Had Nephi gone a few miles north-west he would have found a port with shipbuilding to get the caravans across the Persian Gulf and on to the Orient.) Lehi remained in this first ‘fertile spot’ for weeks waiting for his sons. In a true story this oasis would also belong to a bedouin tribe. This is the last of the ‘fertile’ spots that Smith mentions because in the first verse of the next chapter he tells us from that point on, they went in an ‘eastward’ direction to Bountiful. It was only ‘Bountiful’ in comparison to a sea of sand dunes. The date palms and banana trees were all planted by the Bedouins who lived there and selling supplies to the Caravan Traders.

Looking at his map, Joseph Smith would see the range of mountains along the Red Sea leading to Yemen with a rang of the highest mountains of up to 12,000 ft and would pinpoint probably present day ‘Muscat’ in the country of Oman as his ‘Bountiful’. What Smith didn’t know was his projected ‘eastward’ took his group right into the middle of 250,000 sq mi of nothing but sand dunes! This wasn’t bad enough, Smith did the absolute absurd idea of keeping them wandering in circles for the next 8 years in THESE DUNES!

To further compound these absurdities, this Mormon God now needs to take away all the natural instincts of predatory animals who avoid this area devoid of vegetation and water. And now God needs to feed these unclean animals he has forbidden his chosen humans to eat, with manna, quail and water so Nephi can shoot at them with a stick and then eat their parasite ridden raw flesh because they had no camel dung to make fire and no camel milk to drink. There were also no rocks for Nephi to smite to produce water. There is no mention during the whole 10 years of a single sand storm that Bedouins fight several times a month where the Jewish God protects Camel’s eyes for this type of existence! Their compass only led them correctly based on their faith that it would do so. Did their faith diminish when they saw that the compass brought them continually to the same 5 Wadi or Oasis water holes over the 8 yrs? When they saw their health and the health of their children deteriorate based on just raw meat of predatory animals, didn’t anyone think to ask God WHY ALL OF THIS?

Isn’t it a form of blasphemy to portray your God as cruel, uninformed or stupid?

Does the Mormon God expect Man to suspend his God given power to reason! To get out of this dilemma by saying ‘God’s ways are not Man’s ways’ is a dangerous idea when this same God gave us a brain that allows Man to reason and draw logical conclusions.

Mormons try to overcome reason by asking the truth seeker to follow Moroni’s advise even though Moroni lied about a whole bunch of stuff, including his father’s death!

Moroni 10:4 ‘And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true’;

As long as you don’t misinterpret what is being said and you pray with a sincere heart, with real intent, you will get a burning feeling that ‘these things are NOT TRUE’!

“Fatal Flaws of the Most Correct Book on Earth” can be purchased at Amazon.com

1 I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father…therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days.

[Story timeline is 600BC according to JS. Nephi’s/JS writing timeline is anyone’s guess; 568BC according to Joseph Smith, likely, 1829.]

2 Yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of theJews and the language of the Egyptians.

One comment: Josephus the Jewish Historian says in his ‘History of the Jews’ that the term ‘Jew’ was first applied to the descendants of Judah when they returned from the Babylonian captivity. This would be decades after Lehi was supposed to have left Jerusalem. This term would be unfamiliar and never used by House of Judah people in 600BC!

For Hebrew families living all their days at Jerusalem who weren’t Levite Scribes, being literate in Egyptian would be unthinkable! It would be even less thinkable that a ‘Lay’ person [Laban] would have all the sacred books of the Bible down to Jeremiah including Micah and Malachi and not just on scrolls, but everything engraved on brass [bronze] plates! Having this in the current Egyptian language would appear sacrilegious to most pious Hebrews. It appears that Laban wasn’t a Levite scribe either. How can a pious Hebrew boy say the language of his father who dwelt in/at Jerusalem all his days was Egyptian?

Was Lehi preaching in the streets of Jerusalem in Egyptian? Who did he learn it from? There was no point in Lehi or Laban knowing Egyptian, or Laban translating unobtainable copies of Hebrew scripture into Egyptian even if somehow he was literate in the language. It’s one thing to speak and understand your mother tongue, which most people did, but to be literate in two tongues was the domain of Scribes.

It didn’t happen unless you were one of them. It was a ‘craft’ that Levites dominated and they didn’t just teach ‘anybody’ to read and write languages. The only reason for ‘Egyptian’ was that JS needed the record in an unknown tongue so no one could challenge his translation! If the speculation of Hugh Nibley would be correct and that Lehi was a merchant who traded with Egypt, he might speak rudimentary Egyptian but to read and write something like the Hebrew scriptures in Egyptian would need special schooling for Lehi and family as well as Laban, Ishmael and their families, and it wasn’t available to anyone but a very small group of Levite Scribes.

If Lehi didn’t live at Jerusalem all his days but lived in Elephantine, Egypt with his family, and he found a ‘literate’ Egyptian-Jew, he could be literate in Hebrew and Egyptian, but that’s a different story than what JS tells.

3 And I know that the record which I make is true; and I make it with mine own hand; and I make it according to my knowledge.

How can Nephi say he knows the record is true when he is barely into the third verse? He wrote less than 100 words! Nephi probably writes about 30-40 years later relying on his memory and his father’s record if we can believe Joseph Smith.

4 For it came to pass in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, King of Judah, (my father, Lehi, having dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days); and in that same year there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed.

*2Kings 24:14 says: ‘…none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.’ This is the state of Jerusalem immediately prior to Zedekiah being placed on the throne by the Babylon King in 597BC. The only true prophet in Jerusalem to declare God’s word was Jeremiah. All people of substance were taken captive to Babylon in 598BC, including Ezekiel. Jerusalem was sacked and little was left for Lehi or anyone else to preach repentance to. Bad timing for Joseph Smith! If prophets came immediately after the surrender and sacking of Jerusalem in 598BC saying ‘the people must repent, or the great city of Jerusalem must be destroyed’; the poor people who remained would wonder what cave these prophets lived in and who inspired them! Jeremiah’s prophesy was fulfilled and God led all the ‘good figs’ to Babylon. See Jeremiah 24:5 ‘Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel; Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge them that are carried away captive of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans for their good’. [598BC, just before Zedekiah.]

Jeremiah says in vs. 8: ‘And as the evil figs, which cannot be eaten, they are so evil; surely thus saith the LORD, so will I give Zedekiah the King of Judah, and his princes, and the residue of Jerusalem, that remain in this land, [Lehi & family] and them that dwell in the land of Egypt:

9 And I will deliver them to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth for their hurt, to be a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse, in all places whither I shall drive them.’

10 ‘And I will send the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, among them, till they be consumed from off the land that I gave unto them and to their fathers.’

[The Nephites, if they existed, were certainly consumed off the land and removed for ‘their hurt’!]

A case is to be made that part of the ‘evil figs’ not taken captive to Babylon, were Lehi and family who were driven to a distant ‘kingdom of the earth’ for their ‘hurt’, where they became a reproach, a taunt and a curse! (This was Lehi’s oldest sons’ fate, the Amerindians! Helaman 8:22 ‘Our father Lehi was driven out of Jerusalem’

Nephi obviously never lived in Jerusalem before or during the first year of the reign of Zedekiah or he wouldn’t say what he just said about ‘many prophets’. He wouldn’t say his father lived all his days in Jerusalem but his language was Egyptian. That would be the first oxymormon. (The Bible does say ‘many false prophets’ came to Zedekiah.) It’s unfortunate for JS that he picked the worst possible time for his story, departing from Jerusalem at that time. Jerusalem had just been ‘sacked’ by the King of Babylon and 10,832 captives were taken into Exile.

When Nebuchadnezzar put Zedekiah on the throne, 2Kings 24:14 says: ‘And he [King of Babylon] carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valor, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land.’

This is the contradictory environment in which JS starts his story; with wealthy Laban who can ‘command fifty’ with his servants where he is in his treasury working on an OT translation on nonexistent brass. We have wealthy Lehi with his country estate and treasures! Ishmael, with his available family is not deported. Lehi’s sons could have been considered ‘mighty men of valor’ or ‘apt of war’. Vs. 16 further defines ‘…and smiths a thousand, all that were strong and apt for war, even them the King of Babylon brought captive to Babylon.’ (598BC) The next vs. says it was then that the Babylon King put Zedekiah on the throne!

The Jewish Historian, Flavius Josephus tells it this way in his ‘Antiquities of the Jews’, pg 307: “…for the King of Babylon…gave orders to his generals to take all that were in the city captives, both the youth and the handicraftsmen, and bring them bound to him; their number was ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-two; as also [King] Jehoiachin, and his mother and friends…and appoint Jehoiachin’s uncle, Zedekiah, to be king.’

If we back up to page 306 we have a prelude of what happened three or four months before Zedekiah was made King that the BOM story totally ignores.

‘…he [The Babylonian King] did not observe the covenants he had made, but he slew such as were in the flower of their age, [Not Nephi or Ishmael’s daughters.] and such as were of the greatest dignity, [Not Laban or Lehi!] together with their King Jehoiakim, whom he commanded to be thrown before the walls, without any burial; and made his son Jehoiachin King of the country, and of the city: he also took theprincipal persons in dignity for captives, [Not Lehi, Laban or Ishmael] three thousand in number, and led them to Babylon; among which was the prophet Ezekiel, who was then but young.’

This was 3-4 months before Zedekiah was placed on the throne. Jehoiachin reigned only 3 months before he was replaced by Zedekiah. So here we find that three to four months before Zedekiah was placed on the throne the King of Babylon killed ‘such as were in the flower of their age’. This couldn’t affect Nephi or Sam or the daughters of Ishmael! Sure! The ‘principal persons in dignity for captives’ wouldn’t be Lehi, Laban or Ishmael! Why didn’t Nephi find this important enough to mention if his brothers and sisters weren’t killed in ‘the flower of their age’? How did they escape this first deportation of 3,000 and the second of 10,832, four months later?

Josephus continues in Chapter VII: ‘But a terror seized on the King of Babylon, who had given the kingdom to Jehoiachin, and that immediately; he was afraid that he [Jehoiachin] should bear him a grudge, because of his killing his father, and thereupon should make the country revolt from him; wherefore he sent an army, and besieged Jehoiachin in Jerusalem; but because he [Jehoiachin] was of a gentle and just disposition, he did not desire to see the city endangered on his account, but he took his mother and kindred, and delivered them to the commanders sent by the King of Babylon, and accepted of their oaths, that neither should they suffer any harm nor the city; which agreement they did not observe…for the King of Babylon did not keep it, but gave orders to his generals to take all that were in the city captives, both the youth and the handicraftsmen, and bring them bound to him; their number was ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-two and appointed Zedekiah as king.’

Joseph Smith should know it’s perilous to write history if you have never studied history! To give a fuller picture of Jerusalem, another quote from 2Kings 24:11 ‘And Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon came against the city, and his servants did besiege it…And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which Solomon King of Israel had made in the temple of the LORD, as the LORD had said.’

What about the treasures from Laban’s house, or those from Lehi’s house? Do you think they would be spared? Next to silver, bronze was the most precious and useful metal from which swords and shields and artifacts are made. There was no ‘brass’ during this period. So ‘brass plates’ is a misnomer. The modern Bibles translate the term ‘brass’ to the correct ‘bronze’. The ‘treasures of the house of the LORD would include the 12 bronze oxen and the ‘sea’ that they supported. Next to gold and silver, bronze was on the Babylonian King’s list for removal. If the soldiers are ransacking and looting the city for the second time just before Zedekiah is placed on the throne, do you think they didn’t go to the district where the wealthy lived and ransacked those houses? The Bible says all the persons of dignity (wealthy) were deported! Can we believe that Laban’s villa next to the High Priest’s villa, along with Lehi’s two villas are all untouched? They took all the bronze from the temple but left Laban’s stacks of bronze plates intact in his Treasury? Sure!

Our smart Mormon God who was once a ‘Man’ and is learning on the job has inspired Laban from youth to become literate in Hebrew. He did this by inspiring a Levite Scribe to break the rules and teach someone not of his tribe to read and write Hebrew. God picked this scribe in 620BC because this particular scribe was also literate in Egyptian when King Josiah was paying tribute to Pharaoh Necho of Egypt. It was Necho who put Jehoiakim on the throne that Nebuchadnezzar threw from the city walls; (according to 2Kings) but was carried to Babylon in fetters (according to 2Chronicles) in the 1st sacking of Jerusalem. It was just 6 mos. and two kings before Zedekiah started to reign in 597BC after this second sacking; it left only the poorest people of the land. In all of this upheaval and turmoil, Laban was constrained by the ‘spirit’ to scratch on the hard brass surface, plate after plate of sacred Hebrew text into Egyptian that God’s special angel was wafting from the temple before it was sacked; scroll after scroll from the sanctuary where they were placed by the High Priest. The Mormon God was doing this year after year counting on the diligence of Laban to accomplish this important task so that the soon to be called prophet Lehi could take them with him to America. But, God is busy multi-tasking and let Lehi depart without the ‘bronze’ plates and it took God a couple of weeks and 200 miles on foot by Lehi and family, before God remembered the purpose of working with Laban on a daily basis for the past 30 years.

This is the environment where Lehi was preaching repentance and warning about a future destruction to Jerusalem! When they took the prophet Ezekiel captive, why not Lehi? Why doesn’t Lehi/Nephi tell us how they escaped all of this, two months before they left for the Red Sea? For Joseph Smith, the big event was Lehi’s dream which paralleled the dream of his own father recited many times to the family.

7 AICTPT he returned to his [our] own house at Jerusalem; and he cast himself upon his bed, being overcome with the Spirit and the things which he had seen. [Like all the Elders that were taken captive?]

Nephi just happened to come home after his archery lesson so he was able to see this. Nephi himself was amazed how his mind could recall these details after 30 or more years! JS probably thought by using the term ‘at Jerusalem’ it gave him more flexibility, not fully realizing that Jerusalem was a ‘walled city’. You either lived ‘in’ Jerusalem or you didn’t.

Vs 7 must be chalked up to another error on the part of JS, unless Lehi was really a wealthy merchant. Having a ‘house at Jerusalem’ and one in his ‘inheritance’ land of the half tribe of Manasseh would mean he had to cross through the lands of one or two tribes before he was at his ‘country estate’ with all the gold, silver and treasures. It’s extremely difficult to believe that Lehi and family along with Laban and Ishmael and their families all survived as though the history the Bible and Josephus speak of, never existed! If Lehi had a house that wasn’t protected by the wall of Jerusalem, his was one of the first to fall to the invading Babylonian army along with his gold and silver and precious things! The house of Ishmael was next with his 5 daughters killed, being in ‘the flower of their age’ or captive and headed for Babylon. (Events occurring 1-3 months before Zedekiah became King of Judah!) JS’s story couldn’t occur without reconciling the historical events in Judea, that we hear absolutely nothing about!

Fatal Flaws of The Most Correct Book on Earth (Book of Mormon) can be purchased at Amazon.com